Potential strategies offered by animals to implement in buildings' energy performance. MSCA-IF candidate sought

Brief description of the Centre/Research Group

• The work team represented by the César Martín-Gómez has been working for years on projects that involve the integration of building services and energy systems in complex architectonical cases. Building services here involve fire safety, water management, electricity, data networks, HVAC and renewable energies.

• These research works include architecture and urbanism, history and biology, learning and complex buildings. It is not a mess but a puzzle where the keyword is integration.

• The UNESCO research lines are: 241109 - Regulation of human temperature; 330500 - Construction technology; 330503 - Large buildings and skyscrapers; 330506 - Civil engineering; 330517 - Industrial and commercial buildings; 330537 - Urban planning; 330800 - Environmental engineering and technology; 3322 - Energy technology; 332900 - Urban planning; 550601 - History of architecture; 550624 - History of technology; 580100 - Educational theory and methods.

• Since 2009, the team has participated in 9 research projects: 5 private, 3 regional, 2 national and 1 European, with an income of over 800,000 euros.

• The activity of the team has allowed the publication of more than 33 articles in indexed journals, 24 books or book chapters, and 56 collaborations in Congresses.

Project description

We are looking for a motivated candidate who wish to build a ground-breaking method of scientific research based on creativity, innovation and a holistic approach of the 'nature' laboratory to be applied to architecture.

The proposal must facilitate an unconventional approach and investigations at the interface between biology and architecture. The models to develop, the methodology created and the foreseeable solutions to obtain will allow opening new lines of work in other areas of need of the buildings and cities, from natural models with a high efficiency in all areas, and opens the doors for its application to other disciplines of knowledge. This new model would be based on creativity and innovation, forcing interested researchers to get out of their traditional research guidelines and open new scientific challenges, which will result in the quality of research and the results achieved.

The strategies for thermal regulation and environmental control found in nature are countless. In the proposal, a parallelism between biodiversity and building energy systems will be defined in order to identify and emphasize the immediate opportunities that biomimicry offers for future research. The motivation was the need to find alternative solutions to tackle problems mainly in the efficiency of heating, ventilation and cooling systems.

The researcher would apply for a MSCA-Individual fellowship (deadline 09 September 2020). If successful, the researcher would get a full-time research position at University of Navarra, one of the top rated universities in Spain (Number 1 in employability) for a period ranging 1-3 years depending on the subtype of grant and the interests of the applicant.

Research Areas

• Architectural Engineering

Applications

• Researcher with a PhD degree or equivalent research experience in the field of the project. She/he should not have resided or carried out main activity in Spain for more than 12 months in the last 3 years before the deadline of the call (09 September 2020. MSCA-IF-2020).

   

• CV and letter of motivation. Include a concept note of the research proposal (up to 1 page).