Professor NIU Jianlei

Associate Director, Otto Poon Charitable Foundation Smart Cities Research Institute
Chair Professor of Building Environment and Energy

Fellow of the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers
Fellow of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and Climate
Fellow of the International Building Performance Simulation Association
Fellow of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers
Project Coordinator of RGC Theme-based Research Scheme Funded Project

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Professor Niu’s technology contributions encompass a broad area linking thermal and fluid sciences with building environment control. He was the first to model the buoyancy driven ventilation airflow through building windows, which led to the later understanding of the cross-household airborne transmission risks in high-rise residential buildings. He was the consultant appointed by Google in the design of the cooling system for the largest data centre in the world in 2008. He was the inventor of patented personalised ventilation technology and defined the performance indicator pollutant exposure reduction effectiveness. Combining computational fluid dynamics (CFD) techniques and thermodynamic analysis, he developed a calculation method to quantify, in the design stage, the energy saving of stratified air distribution for air-conditioned buildings. He was a pioneer in systematically modelling radiant cooling technology in thermal comfort control. In collaboration with colleagues in chemical technology, he demonstrated the potential of phase-change-materials as thermal energy storage media for the future renewable energy era. He has led multidisciplinary research in urban microclimate engineering, introducing physics-based wind and thermal climate modelling in combination with AI machine-learning based optimisation to urban renewal with the aim of improving city live-ability and enhancing city resilience to climate change.

He twice won the prestigious The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers-sponsored distinguished lecturer award to give invited lectures in five member countries. He was invited to co-author the World Health Organisation design guidelines 2009 - "Natural ventilation for infection control in health care settings". The Society of Heating, Air-Conditioning and Sanitary Engineers of Japan awarded him the Uichi Inouye Asia International Award in 2024. His inventions in ventilation and energy storage technologies won respectively the Bronze and Gold Award with the Congratulations of the Jury, at the International Exhibition of Inventions: New Techniques & Products, Geneva, while his research on human-oriented outdoor thermal environment evaluation and optimisation design won the Excellence Award at APEC INPUT2 (“Innovating for Public Urban Technology Transformation Competition”) in 2024, which is organised by the China Ministry of Science & Technology and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC). He has been ranked among the World’s Top 2% Scientists released by Stanford University since 2019. He was awarded a fellowship by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-conditioning Engineers, the International Society of Indoor Air Quality and the International Building Performance Simulation Association. Between 2012 and 2014, he served as an associate editor for the Elsevier journal Building and Environment and he is presently editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Energy and Buildings, and a member of the Engineering Panel of the Hong Kong Research Grant Council.

Over the years, he has secured research funding from Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR and industry, including Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s (RGC) General Research Fund (RGC CERG/GRF), Collaborative Research Fund (CRF) and Theme-based Research Scheme (TRS), Innovation and Technology Fund (ITF), Health and Medical Research Fund (RFCID/HMRF) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) / RGC Joint Research Scheme. He is currently leading a TRS project "Healthy and Resilient Cities with Pervasive localised outdoor thermal-comfort hubs (LoCHs)", aiming to develop a simulation-based-optimisation method to create LoCHs by design in the urban and estate planning stage. His thermal energy storage research is being industrially funded by SINOPEC and his outdoor thermal comfort research by MTR.

Research Interests

Computational Fluid Dynamics

Thermal comfort

Building air quality

Thermal energy storage

Urban microclimate

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Professor NIU Jianlei

Research Interests