Dr. Martina Ferrando holds a master’s degree in building engineering and a Ph.D. in energy and nuclear science and technology from Politecnico di Milano. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Department of Energy, where she is pursuing a project on urban building energy modelling. During her studies, she completed a traineeship at the Technical University of Norway (NTNU) in Trondheim, and she was an affiliate at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for nine months, working with the developers of one of the primary urban building energy modelling tools. Her projects focus on improving existing modelling tools for urban-scale energy simulations and applying them to the Italian context using data mining and machine learning techniques.
Prof. Xing Shi currently works as a Professor, Doctoral Supervisor, and Vice Dean at the College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, China. He is also the Director of the Key Laboratory of Ecology and Energy Saving Study of Dense Habitat (Tongji University), Ministry of Education, and the Vice Chairman of the Building Physics Branch of the Architectural Society of China. In 1998, he graduated from the Department of Architectural Engineering of Tongji University. In 2000, he went to the USA to study for a doctorate in architectural technology science at Pennsylvania State University. After obtaining his doctorate in 2005, he joined Walter P Moore, a building structure design and consulting company headquartered in Houston, USA, to engage in design, consulting, and scientific research. His main research directions are urban building energy consumption simulation, urban microclimate, green building performance and its optimization design.
Prof. Francesco Causone is an Associate Professor at Politecnico di Milano. He holds a master's degree in architecture and a PhD in technical innovation for the built environment, and he is a LEED AP. He was awarded the REHVA Young Scientist Award in 2012. He has gained world-class industry experience as a sustainability researcher at Foster + Partners in London. He is a partner in several European research projects focusing on the development of energy, environmental, and housing services. He has been PI of the nationally funded URBEM project for the development of a national database of building archetypes for UBEM simulations. He has been PI of several projects funded by the Italian Energy Agency (ENEA) on the monitoring of energy performance of zero-energy buildings in the Mediterranean climate, on the assessment of outdoor comfort in cities, on Renewable Energy Communities (RECs), and on the development if digital databases for building energy management. From 2007 to 2010, he coordinated a team for the design of a multi-functional sustainable center in Italy, winning the competition. In 2018, he served as an environmental expert on the Co-Inventing Doria team in the international Reinventing Cities call promoted by C40, designing a carbon-neutral hostel. He has been a visiting professor at Paris EST and at Tongji University (Shanghai) and a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge.
