Dr. Ronita Bardhan

Dr. Ronita Bardhanis University Lecturer of Sustainability in the Built Environment, Group Leader of the Sustainable Design Group and Director of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies at the Department of Architecture, as well as Fellow and Director of Studies at Selwyn College.

Ronita works on habitat design, energy decisions and health equality for low-income housing in the Global South, specially focussing in slum rehabilitation housing – using data science and machine learning approaches to understand the social logic of energy and health design.

The focus of her work on slum rehabilitation housing of India, Brazil, Nigeria and Indonesia has the potential to positively impact the lives of the world’s poorest 3 billion people.

Ronita’s motivation to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals through the participation in Cambridge Global Challenges stems from the need for decoupling energy and health burdens from poverty through decolonised and contextualised understanding of the unique socio-technical understanding of transitional societies. She believes that data driven intelligence of built environments can effectively address the sustainability goals and policies. Bardhan uses data-driven methods to couple architectural engineering, AI and machine learning with social sciences to provided built environment solutions for decarbonised transition and health in resources constraint societies. Her tractable research informs demand-side design solutions for sustainable communities (SDG 11) which positively affects well-being (SDG 3), energy security (SDG 7), and gender equality (SDG 5) while entailing fewer environmental risks.