John E. Taylor, professor of civil and environmental engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, presented the John L. Tishman Distinguished Lecture in the Tishman Construction Management Program at the University of Michigan on November 13th. His lecture was entitled “Energy efficiency dynamics at the intersection between human and engineered networks.”
“Recent reports by the National Academies have encouraged deeper exploration of dynamics occurring at the intersection between human and engineered networks,” says Taylor, “in particular those that address important societal problems such as energy conservation.” In his lecture, Taylor reported the results of several experiments aimed at assessing the behavioral impact of providing building occupants with personal and network contextualized electricity utilization data in residential and commercial buildings. He also presented efforts to develop simulation models derived from those experiments of interactions within and between human and engineered networks and their impact on building energy consumption.
A member of the Virginia Tech community since 2011, Taylor is a faculty member in the Vecellio Construction Engineering and Management Program and is the Preston and Catharine White Fellow and associate director for research in the Myers Lawson School of Construction. His research focuses on civil engineering network dynamics of industrial and societal importance, including globalization dynamics, energy efficiency dynamics, workforce virtualization dynamics, information system integration dynamics, and extreme event dynamics.
Taylor serves as director of the Civil Engineering Network Dynamics Lab and has recently been recognized with the Loganathan Teaching Award for Excellence in Civil Engineering Education, the ASCE Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction, and the Construction Industry Institute’s Distinguished Professor Award.
He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tulane University, a second master’s degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University.