IEDE's Marcella Ucci and Jonathon Taylor promoted

UCL only undertakes promotions through the annual promotions round, in order to ensure comparability of excellence across the whole of UCL. The thresholds for promotion at UCL are high, and widely recognised as such. UCL has now published the list of successful promotions effective from the 01 October 2016.

Our congratulations to Dr Marcella Ucci who has been promoted to Senior Lecturer and to Dr Jonathon Taylor who has been promoted to Senior Research Associate.

Dr Marcella Ucci has been a Lecturer in Environmental and Healthy Buildings at UCL since 2007. She graduated in architecture from the University of Naples (Italy), and then obtained an MSc in ‘Environmental Design and Engineering’ and a PhD in indoor air quality and modeling - both from the Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, UCL.

Her research focuses on the interactions and tensions between sustainable building design/operation and the needs of occupants in terms of comfort, health and wellbeing – and has been Guest Editor of three different Special Issues pertaining topics related to her research agenda.  Dr Ucci is Chair of the UK Indoor Environments Group (UKIEG) and a Committee member of the Sustainability Special Interest Group at the British Institute of Facilities Management (BIFM). Dr Ucci is Deputy Editor of Indoor and Built Environment, and Associate Editor of Architectural Science Review. She is also member of the Executive Committee of the UCL Centre for Behaviour Change.

Dr Ucci has been a co-investigator in a variety of research projects, including the Active Buildings study, funded by the School for Public Health Research, through the NIHR, National Institute for Health Research; the network project Welline (Wellbeing and the Indoor Environment), funded by the Lifelong Health and Wellbeing programme managed by the Medical Research Council; and the Building Banter project, a unique collaboration between industry and academics, funded by the Technology Strategy Board (TSB) and by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Previously, Dr Ucci worked as a research associate on a two-year EPSRC funded research on the environmental control of house dust mites, and on a research project for the ODPM Building Regulations Division (under the Buildings Operational Performance Framework) which contributed to the development of the Building Regulations (England and Wales), in particular Part F and L which deal with ventilation and energy.

Dr Jonathon Taylor has been a Research Associate at the Bartlett since 2012. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Simon Fraser University, Canada, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Geomatics from UCL. He obtained his PhD in 2012, jointly between the Bartlett and the UCL Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geomatic Engineering on using microbial and hygrothermal modelling to predict risks from long-term damp following floods in the UK.

Jonathon’s current research focuses on modelling overheating, air pollution, moisture, and disease transmission within buildings, and the implications for the health of the building occupants. He is particularly interested in how housing may act as a spatially-varying modifier of population exposure to such hazards, and his work has a strong GIS element. He is currently involved in the Health Protection Research Unit for Environmental Change and Health (HPRU), Sustainable Health in Urban Environments (SHUE), Total Performance of Low Carbon Buildings (TOP), and the Gas Safety Trust (GST) projects. Additionally, he is a collaborator on the Bartlett Materialisation Grant – funded Flood House and a collaboration with the Department of Infection and Population Health on a UCL Grand Challenges project examining the risk of TB transmission in public buildings in South Africa.