Innovation for Sustainable Built Environments

Innovation for Sustainable Built Environments is an interdisciplinary organized research group working with FIU's Metropolitan Center and the Lehman Center for Transportation Research. Our research, teaching, and services will advance sustainable design and development for healthy, livable and resilient environments as it relates to these fields.

We include faculty from FIU's:

Mission & Goals

Given the significant impact of human development on the natural environment, sustainable development practices have considerable capacity to reduce energy consumption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve coastal conditions, and improve human health and quality of life. Our faculty share the view that sustainable development of the built environment must be concurrent with the protection of the natural environment for present and future generations. In addition, they regard that the built environment is more than the collection of buildings and their infrastructure and that it is the physical outcome of complex social, ecological, and environmental processes.

Sustainable development presents an opportunity to draw from a range of perspectives in various disciplines to address our current and future challenges. We provide an interdisciplinary venue for research and collaboration among the disciplines of architecture, computer science, construction, engineering, environmental and ecological sciences, health sciences, and urban planning to deepen our understanding and advance innovative strategies for sustainable development.

As effective collaboration among these diverse areas requires the ability to communicate and synthesize vast amounts of information across disciplinary boundaries, we will leverage advances in data management technologies to facilitate knowledge discovery through integration of information from complex data sources. We aim to create an FIU strategic strength in sustainable design and development through informatics.

Objectives

Our specific objectives are to:

  • Provide an interdisciplinary venue for research in green building design, clean energy, sustainable transportation systems, soil and water resource management, and public health
  • Support faculty research to effectively mine, integrate and share data for conducting research and educating students
  • Develop curriculum and deliver a rigorous certificate program enabled by data-driven technologies and context-based learning methods to educate future generations of students
  • Serve the professional community by sharing research results, technical reports, publications, lectures and educational outreach