Dr Kun Lyu

Biography

Dr Kun Lyu is a Lecturer in Architecture at Queensland University of Technology. His research advances climate adaptation in the built environment by reframing thermal comfort as a dynamic, multisensory, and socially situated process. Rather than treating comfort as a fixed physiological target, his work examines how physiological, behavioural, psychological, cultural, and socioeconomic processes shape comfort, sensory delight, well-being, and resilience.

His emerging research agenda investigates how people experience, adapt to, and recover from heat across indoor, semi-outdoor, and urban environments. Through this work, he aims to inform adaptive built environment systems across urban, building, and personal scales, linking climate-responsive design with human health, everyday practices, and equitable adaptation.

Kun completed his PhD at the University of Sydney, where he examined how thermal pleasure, alliesthesia, culturally shaped adaptation, and multisensory experience in semi-outdoor environments contribute to psychological restoration for workplace occupants. His PhD also developed a multisensory virtual reality approach for studying human–environment interactions. During his postdoctoral research at EPFL, he extended this agenda to urban heat mitigation, climate-adaptive building design, and multidomain indoor environmental quality, examining how urban-scale interventions interact with building performance and occupant experience. His work has been published in leading journals including Building and Environment and Automation in Construction, and his paper on restorative semi-outdoor workplace environments received the Building and Environment (Q1) Best Paper Award in 2022.