Introducing our new Staff – Priyadarsini Rajagopalan

Dr Priyadarsini Rajagopalan is an Associate Professor in the School of Property, Construction and Project management. Priya has over 15 years of experience in building science research and teaching. She brings to the construction programme a substantial knowledge base and skills in environmentally sustainable design and evaluation. The main areas of her research include energy for buildings, urban climatology, urban environmental physics and indoor environmental performance of buildings. Priya’s research expertise has been recognised with industry funded projects as well as industry based internships for PhD students. She has coordinated a number of projects in the area of benchmarking energy performance of different types of building in the tropical and temperate climates. The outcomes from her scholarship have directly informed the national building industry through the development of performance indicators and assessment tools for certain complex building typologies such as indoor aquatic centres.

Prior to joining RMIT, Priya worked in the School of Architecture and Built Environment, Deakin University and National University of Singapore. She took on many leadership roles such as the Chair of the Energy and Greenhouse Gas working group, leader of the Building Environment research cluster and Higher Degree by Research (HDR) coordinator and made significant contributions to the planning and strategic direction of Deakin University. She has published a number of papers in high ranked journals and many of my papers are cited widely within the national and international research community in the built environment discipline. Her current research include investigating the impact of future growth scenarios in Melbourne, developing urban heat island mitigation strategies, benchmarking energy performance of aquatic centres and benchmarking energy and indoor environmental quality of healthcare buildings, acoustics performance of public libraries as well as integral theory based architectural sustainability evaluation. She is a Chief Investigator of the ARC Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities project (2016), An Australian housing condition infrastructure.

Author: Dr. Priyadarsini Rajagopalan