A graduation ceremony at Loughborough on England’s hottest ever day marked the end of a journey of discovery for three LoLo CDT students.
Drs Dan Wright (left), Nafsika Drosou and Matt Li, with the Loughborough CDT Director, Kevin Lomas (right), celebrated with family and friends making the most of the outdoor drinks reception and canapes!, with Nafsika brightly celebrating her Filipino heritage.
Prof Lomas commented “A PhD is a hard intellectual undertaking, and one that often happens at a time of significant change in young peoples’ lives. Success needs to be celebrated as a supreme achievement as well as for the substantive contributions to knowledge”.
The three PhD projects illustrate the interlinked nature of the problems to be tackled in low-carbon buildings – improving the thermal efficiency of walls and roofs, providing effective control of the heating system, and attending to other human requirements, such as access to adequate daylight.
- Building thermal performance of UK dwellings: Assessment of methods for quantifying whole-dwelling heat loss in occupied homes (Li, 2022).
- The energy-saving potential of domestic zonal space heating controls: A socio-technical assessment of semi-detached and owner-occupied UK homes (Wright, 2021).
- A framework to characterise operational daylighting performance in classrooms: measurement, observation and user perspectives (Drosou,2022).
Their hard work in the LoLo CDT has enabled all three graduates to advance into professions that can make a real difference. Dan is now the Head of Sustainability at Kent Community Health NHS Foundation Trust, Nafsika is the Senior Project Support Officer at Midlands Net Zero Hub, Nottingham City Council, and Matt is a Research Associate in the Building Energy Research Group at Loughborough.