ESBL + BioBE Welcome Siobhan Rockcastle as new Assistant Professor of Architecture!

by sueishaq
| January 22, 2018 |
Energy Studies and Buildings Laboratory and Biology and the Built Environment are thrilled to announce that Dr. Siobhan “Shevy” Rockcastle has joined the team as a new Assistant Professor of Architecture, and Chair of the Baker Lighting Lab, in the Department of Architecture on the main University of Oregon campus in Eugene. She will be adding her expertise in architectural design, human perception, environmental dynamics, and building performance with a focus on occupant well-being, particularly with lighting. Dr. Rockcastle’s current research uses virtual reality to map human responses to daylight and composition in immersive architectural environments. In addition, she is studying the impacts of climate on perception, emotion, and comfort in architecture; the use of virtual reality to study subjective, behavioral, and physiological responses to space; the impacts of light exposure on human health through hormonal responses in the brain; and impacts of sunlight composition on perceptual evaluations of architecture. Students interested in any of these topics are encouraged to contact Dr. Rockcastle to learn about current research opportunities.Shevy earned her professional BArch from Cornell University in 2008 and her SMArchS degree in Building Technology from MIT in 2011. She has taught design studio and seminar courses in environmental systems at Cornell University, Northeastern, MIT, and EPFL. Her professional work experience includes KVA matX, Snøhetta, MSR, Epiphyte lab, and Gensler. As a continuation of her thesis at MIT, Siobhan’s PhD dissertation used experiments to measure the impacts of daylight and spatial composition on perceptual responses to architecture and proposed simulation-based algorithms to predict these responses under varied climatic conditions. She has published numerous peer-reviewed journal and conference articles on this work and combines scientific publication with applied creative practice. She is also a co-founder of OCULIGHT dynamics, a Swiss company  offering daylight design support through custom simulation-based tools.

 

Virtual reality can assess comfort and perception at the design phase.