Tristan is an associate professor in climate resilience; his research is in the area of building physics, investigating the effects of climate change on the built environment, the origin and manipulation of the heat island effect, the adaptation building designs and increasing the resilience of the built environment to climatic change.

Tristan is a building physicist who specialises in the effects of climate change on the built environment. He received an MPhys in Physics in 2004 and completed a PhD in experimental low-temperature solid-state physics in 2008 (both from the University of Exeter).

After completing his PhD, he joined the Centre for Energy and the Environment at the University of Exeter as a research fellow in climate change adaptation. His research focused on the creation of future weather for building simulation, thermal modelling of different buildings and designing adaptation strategies looking at impacts on energy usage, comfort levels, human health and productivity under different projections of climate change.

Tristan received the CIBSE Napier Shaw Medal in 2012 for his part in the creation of probabilistic future weather years using the outputs of UKCP09 as part of the EPSRC-funded PROMETHEUS project.

Research

For a building to be considered truly sustainable it has to be sustainable over its entire life cycle, not just for a few years after construction; however, optimising architecture and construction for a particular location and climate presents problems when we consider anthropogenic climate change. Thus far this particular aspect of sustainability has gone largely unexplored resulting in the construction of low carbon buildings, which may function in the short-term but fail in the longer-term. Tristan’s research is concerned with how we can improve our buildings to maintain performance over their whole life in the face of a changing climate and how we can use green and blue infrastructure to manipulate the urban microclimate to increase resilience to climatic change.

Interested in supervising students studying:

• Climate change resilience of buildings and urban areas
• The urban heat island
• Zero carbon design
• Nature based solutions 
• Microclimate studies