Associate Professor Riccardo Paolini

Fields of Research (FoR)

Architectural science and technology, Building science, technologies and systems, Architectural engineering

SEO tags

Residential Energy Conservation and Efficiency

Commercial Building Management and Services

Biography

Riccardo by training is a building engineer and he received a Ph.D. in Building Systems Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, in 2011. He joined UNSW Built Environment in February 2017. He is an Associate Professor in the High Performance Architecture research cluster, where he is also the manager of the HPA Lab. Riccardo is also an affiliate of the Heat Island Group, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA. Previously, he had an appointment as post-doc at Politecnico di Milano, Italy (2011-2017). He had been teaching heat and moisture transport in building envelope applications at Politecnico di Milano at postgraduate level for six years. He now teaches in the Architecture Program at the School of Built Environment.

My Grants

Riccardo has been a chief investigator in research projects funded by the Australian Research Council, the Department of Energy of the Australian Government, the CRC for Low Carbon Living, Local Governments, and industry. The total apportioned income in Australia exceeds 1M$ (more than 3M$ unapportioned). Previously, Riccardo contributed to research project projects funded by Italian Ministries for Research and for Economic Development, the EU Commission and the State of California, USA. He extensively researched the impact of weathering and soiling on the optical-radiative performance of building skins.

A selection of more recent projects include:

ARC Discovery Projects

Ranzi, G., Paolini, R. (2023-2026). DP230103050: Adaptive daytime radiative cooling and heating for buildings | Funded by: ARC Discovery Project: $567,630

Santamouris, M., Ranzi, G., Paolini, R. (2022-2025). DP220100318: Fluorescent daytime radiative cooling for urban heat mitigation | Funded by: ARC Discovery Project: $570,000

Ranzi, G., Santamouris, M., Paolini, R. (2018-2021). DP180101589: Elastocaloric cooling systems for buildings and the built environment | Funded by: ARC Discovery Project: $362,734

Federally funded research

Santamouris, M., Prasad, D., Paolini, R., Haddad, S., Vasilakopoulou, K. (2021-2022) Energy Efficiency and Training Information Project on Commercial Buildings | Funded by: Australian Government - Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources

Santamouris, M., Prasad, D., Ding, L., Osmond, P., Paolini, R., Haddad, S. (2021-2022) Cool Roofs Cost Benefit Analysis | Funded by: Australian Government - Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources

Rajagopalan, P., Santamouris, M., Andamon, MM., Carre, A., Edirisinghe, R., Synnefa, A., Paolini, R. (2017-2021). CSG55969: Scientists work with communities to improve urban microclimate | Funded by: DIIS Citizen Science Grants Shared Grant. https://citizenscienceproject.org.au/

Projects on urban heat, its impacts and mitigation, funded by Local Governments or other sources

Paolini, R., Pfautsch, S., CIs: Nazarian, N., Hart, M. Wujeska-Klause, A., Chan, HLC, Woolley, N., King, L. (2023-2024). Too hot to play: quantifying the impacts of urban climate change on playground activity | Funded by: UNSW-WSU Alliances - Project Mezze: $49,991 - https://unsw.to/too-hot-to-play

Pfautsch, S., Morrison, N., Paolini, R., van den Nouwelant, R., Hird, W., Isedale, G. (2021) Hot Hospital Carparks - An Avoidable Risk for Patients and Visitors? | Funded by: SPHERE (Maridulu Budyari Gumal) Healthy Urban Environments Collaboratory Seed Funding Shared Grant

Santamouris, M., Paolini, R., Pignatta, G., Haddad, S. (2019-2021) Evidence Based Interventions for Urban Cooling | Funded by: Blacktown City Council - Local Government NSW - Increasing Resilience to Climate Change Program

Santamouris, M., Pignatta, G., Haddad, S., Brozzetti, M., Paolini, R., Nazarian, N., Bartesaghi Koc, C. (2018-2019) Preliminary Design of a Smart Climatic Road in Phillip St Parramatta | Funded by: CRC for Low Carbon Living & City of Parramatta Council

Santamouris, M., Yenneti, K., Synnefa, A., Paolini, R. (2018-2019) Parramatta Urban Overheating Study | Funded by: City of Parramatta Council

Santamouris, M; Synnefa, A; Paolini, R; Haddad, S (2018) RP1040: Advanced hybrid ventilation systems for schools | Funded by: CRC for Low Carbon Living.

My Awards

UNSW Faculty of Built Environment – Learning & Teaching Award 2020 for COVID-19 Course Design
UNSW Faculty of Built Environment – Research Excellence Award 2018 for level C (16/11/2018)
Best Paper Award-Runner up (for the paper written best), December 2018, R. Paolini, S. Haddad, A. Synnefa, S. Garshasbi, M. Santamouris. (2018). Electricity demand reduction in Sydney and Darwin with local climate mitigation. In P. Rajagopalan & M.M. Andamon (Eds.), Engaging Architectural Science: Meeting the Challenges of Higher Density, Melbourne, Australia.
"Pietro Natale Maggi" Award. July 2014, Italian National Conference ISTeA 2014 "Energy, Sustainability and Building Information Modelling and Management", Best paper: Paolini, R., T. Poli, G. Terraneo, M. Zinzi, E. Carnielo, A.G. Mainini, "Building envelope's optical-radiative performance over time: natural exposure in urban environments, and accelerated weathering and soiling".
Best paper award. May 2008, 11th International Conference on Durability of Building Materials and Components, Istanbul, Turkey, Daniotti, B., Lupica, S., Paolini, R. "Climatic Data Analysis to Define Accelerated Ageing for Reference Service Life Evaluation".

My Research Activities

Riccardo's main research interests concern cool materials for urban heat mitigation and shortwave radiation in the built environment. More broadly, his interest is in building physics and its applications to the design of building and urban envelopes, with a specific focus on the hygrothermal performance over time, namely during the service life of building and urban assets, and the mutual influence between buildings – and their energy needs – and the urban microclimate.

My Research Supervision

Supervision keywords

urban heat island

buildings

Areas of supervision

My areas of supervision include:

Cool materials for heat mitigation, including their performance over time (ageing)
Shortwave radiation in the built environment
Heat and moisture transport in building envelope components and built environment surfaces
Building performance during extreme heat events

Former doctoral students are now postdoc researchers at UNSW, ETH Zurich, and MIT (Fullbright Fellowship).

Notes for PhD applicants: Please read the list of my recent research projects and titles of publications linked on this page (or accessible via Scopus). This will give you a precise idea of my current research focus. For me to commit to supervision, there must be an alignment between your interests and my research area.

I supervise only doctoral students with a quantitative background who wish to pursue a research path with a predominant experimental component (i.e., in the lab for research on heat mitigation materials and outdoors for urban overheating). I do not supervise doctoral students focusing only on theoretical aspects (i.e., building performance simulations or microclimate modelling), and most importantly, I do not supervise outside my research area.

My Teaching

Teaching in the Architecture Program of the School of Built Environment, Faculty of Arts, Design and Architecture, UNSW

2018 – present Course convenor of ARCH7809 “Architectural Environment and Building Services”, Master of Architecture, School of Built Environment, UNSW
2018 – present Lecturer and course convenor (i.e., full course coordination) of ARCH7213 “Performance over Time of Building Systems”, Master of Architecture, School of Built Environment, UNSW

Tutorials and guest lectures in the Architecture program in ARCH1261, ARCH1161, ARCH7218, ARCH7112/3.

Teaching in the Doctoral Program at Politecnico di Milano

2016   Lecturer and coordinator – PhD module of 40 hours “Heat and Moisture Transport Fundamentals and Applications in Building Envelope Design”, Doctoral programme ABC, Politecnico di Milano, Italy (http://tinyurl.com/hyabkqz).
2015   Lecturer and coordinator – PhD module of 40 hours “Building Performance Based Design - Heat and Moisture Transport Modelling Applications in Building Envelope Design”, Doctoral School of Politecnico di Milano, Italy (http://tinyurl.com/pqe4b9x).
2014 – 2015    Lecturer – PhD module of 40 hours “Building Performance Based Design - Radiative-Convective Modelling of Urban Microclimate”, Doctoral programme ABC – Politecnico di Milano, Italy (http://tinyurl.com/pqe4b9x).

Other teaching experience at Politecnico di Milano

2008-2016 Tutorials in Technical Architecture (Architettura Technica), Building Pathology (Patologia e Diagnostica Edilizia) and module coordination on heat and moisture transport applications for building envelope design.

My former teaching assistants now have lecturer positions at the University of Sydney, University of Wollongong, Central Queensland University, and Leeds Beckett Uni (UK).

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