Course Staff
Gerhard Schmitt
Professor of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich
Gerhard Schmitt is Professor of Information Architecture at ETH Zurich, leader of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Simulation Platform and Principal Investigator in BigData-Informed Urban Design of the Future Cities Laboratory 2, Founding Director of the Singapore-ETH Centre in Singapore, and ETH Zurich Senior Vice President for ETH Global. His research focuses on urban simulation, Smart Cities and linking Big Data with Urban Design. From 1998-2008 he served as Vice President for Planning and Logistics and Member of the Board of ETH Zurich. He directed the development of ETH’s strategy and planning in cooperation with the 16 scientific departments. From 1984 to 1988 he conducted CAAD research and teaching at Carnegie Mellon University. He was Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Technical University of Denmark and at the Technical University of Delft. From 2004-2007 he chaired the Visiting Committee of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and initiated ETH Science City.
Peter Edwards
Director of the Singapore-ETH Center, ETH Zurich
Peter Edwards is director of the Singapore-ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability. An ecologist by training, he obtained his Ph.D. degree from Cambridge University for a study on nutrient cycling in tropical rain forest. In 1993 he was appointed professor of plant ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where he also served as dean of the Department of Environmental Systems Science. Peter a strong interest in the application of science and technology for better policy and management. He was a member of the executive board of the Alliance for Global Sustainability, a research partnership between several leading universities. He continues his own research into the environmental benefits of urban greenery.
Professor Jacobs’ received her undergraduate and Masters’ training in Human Geography from the University of Adelaide, Australia. She completed her PhD at University College London. Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, Professor Jacobs taught at University College London from 1989 to 1991, The University of Melbourne from 1992 to 2002, The University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2010, and the National University Singapore in 2011. She was a founding member of Melbourne’s Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and served a term as its Director. Professor Jacobs has supervised more than 15 PhD students, and has been on the editorial team of various journals, including the Geographical Research, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Scottish Geographical Journal, Cultural Studies Review, Social and Cultural Geographies, Transactions IBG (NS), Gender, Place and Culture, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Antipode. Sharing the same name as urban scholar Jane Jacobs, who authored the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Professor Jacobs has become an expert in professional disambiguation.
Stephen Cairns
Scientific Directory of the ETH Future Cities Laboratory, ETH Zurich
Stephen Cairns completed his undergraduate degree in anthropology and classical studies at the University of Otago. He trained in architecture at the University of Auckland, and practiced as an architect in New Zealand, Australia and the Pacific, designing the competition-winning entry for the Headquarters for the Secretariat of the Pacific Community in Noumea. He subsequently undertook doctoral studies at the University of Melbourne writing a thesis on the colonial architecture in Java, with an emphasis on aesthetics and the politics of representation.
On completion of his PhD he was appointed to a Lectureship at the University of Melbourne. He took up a Senior Lectureship at the University of Edinburgh, and was appointed Professor of Architecture and Urbanism there in 2009. He served as Head of Department of Architecture, and Director of the newly founded Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. He is currently based in Singapore where he is Scientific Director of the Future Cities Laboratory.
Jan Carmeliet
Professor of Building Physics, ETH Zurich
Since June 2008, Jan Carmeliet is full professor at the Chair of Building Physics at ETH Zürich and head of the Laboratory of Multiscale studies in Building Physics of EMPA, Dübendorf (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology), Switzerland. Jan Carmeliet, graduated from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (K.U.Leuven) in Engineering Architecture and earned his PhD in Civil Engineering at K.U.Leuven in 1992. He has been Assistant (1998), Associate (2001) and Full professor (2004) at K.U.Leuven and part-time Professor at T.U.Eindhoven (2001-2008). He was in 2007 on sabbatical leave at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and at Los Alamos Governmental Laboratories. His research resulted until now in 191 scientific journal papers. His research interests concern multiscale behaviour of porous and granular materials, heat-air-moisture flow in the urban environment and energy systems at building and urban scale. Research is based on advanced computational modelling (atomistic, discrete element, lattice Boltzmann, CFD, FEM) and advanced experimental techniques (X-ray and Neutron Tomography,…) and time-resolved imaging in wind and water tunnels (PIV, …).
He is member of the research commission of ETH Zürich, of the Board of Energy Science Centre ETH Zürich, of the scientific commission of the CCEM (Centre of Competence Energy and Mobility), expert of the Commission of Technology and Innovation Switzerland (CTI/engineering), graduate program director ‘master integrated building systems’ at ETHZ and Coordinator of the SCCER-efficiency (Swiss Centre of Competence of Energy Research).
Matthias Roth
Associate Professor of Geography, National University of Singapore
Matthias Roth is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD degree from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Canada). His research examines how land-use changes affect local climates with a particular focus on the climate of cities. He has held past academic appointments in Canada and Japan and was a Visiting Professor/Researcher at ETH and EPFL (Switzerland), ASU (USA) and Monash University (Australia). He is Past President of the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC) and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Climatology. He is currently Deputy Head of the Department of Geography and Deputy Director of the NUS Bachelor of Environmental Studies programme.
Alex Erath
Postdoctoral Fellow, ETH Future Cities Laboratory
Dr. Alex Erath is currently a senior researcher at the NRF funded Future Cities Laboratory. As research module coordinator (Deputy PI), he manages the research module on Mobility and Transportation Planning and lead in this role the implementation and further development of the large-scale, agent-based transport demand model MATSim Singapore. He obtained his PhD in 2011 from ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) where he studied the vulnerability of transport infrastructure. His main research interests are multi-agent, activity-based transport demand modeling, the interaction between transport infrastructure and the built environment as well as travel behaviour modeling. In this domain, he was involved various studies with a focus on stated preference surveys and led a project on long-term fuel price elasticity that featured stated adaptation face-to-face interviews.
Dr. Matthias Berger is Senior Researcher and Module Coordinator of the Simulation Platform Module IX at the Future Cities Laboratory in the Singapore-ETH Centre, working in Singapore since 2011. The research focus is simulation and visualization of energy-related issues of urban environments. Dr. Berger received the Dipl.-Ing. in Electrical Engineering from the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg in 2006. He joined the High Voltage Laboratory of ETH Zurich (2006 - 2011) where his PhD was dedicated to modeling and optimization of multiple energy carrier systems. His practical experiences include working as a project coordinator for Seed Sustainability (2007 - 2008) as well as R&D at EADS Space Transportation and EADS Astrium (2005 - 2006).
Ulrike Wissen Hayek
Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich
Dr. Ulrike Wissen Hayek is Senior Scientist and Lecturer at the Chair Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems (PLUS) at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) since 2012. She holds a PhD from the ETH Zurich, a diploma in Landscape Architecture and Planning from the Technical University of Munich (Germany), and she is a trained landscaper. Her key research focuses on the assessment and management of landscape change, GIS-based 3D landscape visualization, and transdisciplinary planning studies. Recently she managed the project “Sustainable Urban Patterns (SUPat)” funded by the Swiss National Research Program 65 “New Urban Quality” that resulted in a collaborative platform and tools suitable to foster a better understanding of the interconnected dynamics of the urban landscape systems.
Estefania Tapias
Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer, Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich
Estefania Tapias is Postdoctoral fellow and Lecturer at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her research is focus on Information Cities and climate-sensitive urban planning. Estefania attained her doctoral degree at ETH Zurich and obtained the PhD label from Climate-KIC; one of three Knowledge and Innovation Communities (KICs) created by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). At ETH Zurich she teaches the course ‘Digital Urban Simulation’ where ETH students learn how to analyse and generate spatial urban configurations with advanced computational methods.