Madlen Simon
Co-director
Madlen Simon is a Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland. Her research and teaching centers on design thinking, the iterative process of integrating human experience into problem solving and finding innovative approaches to support how people use and interact with their environment. She was co-Principal Investigator on WaterShed, the University of Maryland's first prize-winning entry into the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon 2011. Her current research, in collaboration with Assistant Professor Ming Hu, combines an immersive virtual environment (VR) and electroencephalogram (EEG) as a promising tool to investigate human response to built environments and evaluate alternative options during the early design stage of a project. This work is funded by an AIA Upjohn Research Initiative Grant.
Ming Hu
Co-director
Ming Hu is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on how smart technologies have an impact on human and environmental health in the built environment. Smart building technology can take a leading role in the transformation of the public health market by turning buildings into responsive, user-focused, health-conscious, and interconnected systems.Her primary research activities in this area will be mainly represented in her second book, Smart Technologies and Design for Healthy Built Environments. This book will be published in July 2020 by Springer. This book provides a snapshot of current state-of-the-art smart technologies applied in the built environment. It first discusses the connections between built environment and public health, then explain the major influential factors/categories from built environment to public health: physical, physiological, biological and psychological factors.
Edward Bernat
Co-director
Dr. Bernat’s research focuses on brain mechanisms that underlie individual differences in cognitive and affective processing. This involves basic science work developing measures for critical mechanisms, and clinical-translational work assessing how these mechanisms relate to psychopathology and individual differences. Currently funded work includes a focus on substance use among lower SES minority individuals in a inpatient DC residential drug treatment facility. Broadly, projects there focus on brain mechanisms underlying substance use and psychopathology, and change in these mechanisms during treatment. For example, one thread focuses on the relationship between trauma and substance use, and development of brief trauma interventions. Another thread is focused on changes in drug and other cue-reactivity during the initial period of abstinence (cue-incubation), and how this can index vulnerability to relapse. Emerging transdiagnostic (dimensional) models of psychopathology play a prominent role in the inferences involved in this work. The most common model involves three primary factors: 1) impulse control (externalizing) problems such as substance dependence, antisocial behavior, and psychopathy, 2) internalizing problems involving anxiety and depression, and 3) the shared variance between internalizing and externalizing (referred to as a psychopathology factor; p-factor).
Spencer Fix
Spencer Fix is a health psychologist and postdoctoral researcher specializing in time-frequency EEG analyses. I apply these methods to study the neural network interactions associated with cognitive and affective control. More specifically, my recent work includes examinations of EEG activity and connectivity among those with substance use disorders, brief and long-term meditation practices, and experiences of racial discrimination.
Augusto Iglesias
Post-Baccalaureate Research Assistant
Augusto Iglesias graduated from the University of Maryland with a B.A. in Architecture and a Minor in Spanish. As an Argentinian-American he is bilingual and bicultural. Augusto is interested in Neuroaesthetics and how the future of the field will inform the design process. Some of his side projects involve directing his own exhibit and creating his own startup.
David Milner
David Milner is a research assistant at the BRAVR Lab, and has been a research affiliate at the University of Maryland since 2019. He received his B.S. in Architecture from the University of Maryland in 2020, and is currently a Master’s candidate at the University of Colorado – Boulder in the Architectural Engineering Dept. As an undergrad at the University of Maryland, David took part in research projects in the areas of net zero energy, carbon neutrality, and indoor environmental analysis under Prof. Ming Hu.
Anthony Vivino
Anthony Vivino is research assistant, EEG/ERP data analysis under Dr. Edward Bernat uses amplitude and phase-synchrony measures to assesses brain oscillations in response to monetary reward feedback, especially regarding medial frontal and sensorimotor processes in the theta and beta bands implicated in learning from behavior outcomes.