Potential strategies offered by animals to implement in buildings' energy performance. Recruiting MSCA Postdoctoral fellow candidate

Hosting Description

The Universidad de Navarra (UNAV) is a non-profit private university founded in 1952 based in Pamplona, Spain. It confers 56 official degrees and administers more than 90 postgraduate programs (including 20 doctoral programs and 42 master’s programs) through 10 schools, two superior colleges, the IESE Business School and its 5 comprehensive Research Centres: CCUN (Cancer Centre Clínica Universidad de Navarra), BIOMA (Biodiversity and Environment Institute) and DATAI (Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence), ICS (INSTITUTE FOR CULTURE AND SOCIETY and CIN (Centre for Nutrition Research).

UNAV has more than 14.000 students in 5 campuses: Pamplona, San Sebastian, Madrid, Barcelona and New York with a wide network of international universities and research centres.

UNAV has a sound track record in participating in European Research Programs. The university has participated in 126 European projects from FP4 to Horizon Europe, including LIFE, ERASMUS+ and INTERREG Programs; of which 22 projects were coordinated by the university. The University also counts with a thorough experience in MSCA and ERC grants with over 26 signed grants.

UNAV been awarded with the HR Excellence in Research quality seal (HRS4R) that guarantees the implementation of the European Charter for Researchers and the Code of Conduct for the Recruitment of Researchers.

The work team represented by the César Martín-Gómez has been working from 2001 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.

Since 2009, the team has participated in 18 research projects: 6 private, 6 regional, 3 national and 3 European.

The activity of the team has allowed the publication of more than 43 articles in indexed journals and 79 collaborations in Congresses.

Offer 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.