Ronita Bardhan

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Professor Ronita Bardhan
Born	Kolkata, India
🎓 Alma mater	Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur (BArch) Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (MCP) University of Cambridge (MA) University of Tokyo (PhD)
💼 Occupation
👔 Employer	University of Cambridge Stanford University IIT Bombay
🏅 Awards	EPSRC Women in Engineering Ambassador (2023) Top 50 Women in Engineering finalist (UK, 2024)
🌐 Website	www.arct.cam.ac.uk/people/professor-ronita-bardhan

Ronita Bardhan is an architectural engineer and professor of Sustainable design and urban health at the University of Cambridge. She is Deputy Head and Director of Research at the Department of Architecture, where she leads the Sustainable Design Group to develop data-driven approaches for reducing climate and health risks in the built environment. Bardhan is affiliated with Cambridge Public Health and the Department of Computer Science and Technology. She advises the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Pathfinder Initiative on the health co-benefits of climate mitigation. Since 2022, she has served on the editorial board of Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio). She also serves as an Associate Editor of the Elsevier journal Urban Climate.

Bardhan’s research sits at the intersection of architecture, climate, and public health. She integrates building physics, data science, and epidemiology to inform sustainable urban design and population-health outcomes. Her studies examine heat stress and health, especially in low-income settings, and the gendered dimensions of thermal comfort and climate resilience. At Cambridge, her group has developed AI methods using satellite thermography to identify heat transfer and energy loss in UK housing. Her work on climate–health interactions has been covered by BBC, CNN, and Reuters.

She has spoken at international forums, including the Asian Development Bank seminar “Rising Above the Heat: Forging Gender-Responsive Strategies to Extreme Heat” (2024). Bardhan has been recognised for her contributions to sustainable architecture and urban health. She was listed among the Top 50 Women in Engineering in the United Kingdom (2024), named an EPSRC Women in Engineering Ambassador (2023), and included in MatterMinds’ 30 Professors in Sustainable Architecture for her work on climate-responsive and health-driven design.

Education and Early Career

Bardhan studied architecture at the Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, and obtained a master's degree in City Planning from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. She earned a PhD in Urban Engineering from the University of Tokyo as a MEXT scholar, where her doctoral research focused on the quality of life in high-density urban environments.

She began her academic career as an assistant professor at the Centre for Urban Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, where she established the Sustainable Design Group (SDG Research). She later served as the Shimizu Visiting Professor at Stanford University.

Bardhan has held international research fellowships, including the Charles Wallace India Trust Fellowship at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), University of Cambridge and the BHAVAN Fellowship from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. Her research at CRASSH examined well-being and energy use in low-income housing, analysing how household energy choices relate to comfort and socio-economic conditions in emerging economies. She received the Young Researcher Award in 2012 for her work on sustainable urban regeneration in Japan.

Research

Bardhan’s research investigates how built-environment features affect health, energy use, and climate resilience by integrating building physics, environmental data science, and epidemiology. Her work focuses on three pressing challenges—urban heat, energy insecurity, and gendered vulnerability—and offers empirical evidence on how design decisions influence well-being and adaptation.

In temperate regions, she identified a “heat-stress dichotomy” in London homes through a study in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2025), showing that while residents gradually adapt to warmer conditions, they remain highly vulnerable during short extreme heat events. These insights inform energy retrofit and insulation standards that balance long-term adaptation with protection during heat spikes. In tropical contexts, her field experiments in Singapore demonstrated that street shading can reduce mean radiant temperature by up to 10 °C and lessen severe heat stress by 20 %, providing evidence for climate-resilient urban design. In Kenya, she developed a coupled health-risk framework linking indoor overheating and malaria transmission, showing that simple architectural modifications—ventilated eaves with insect screens—can reduce both heat exposure and vector risk.

Her work also highlights gendered inequalities in heat exposure, especially in low-income settlements. Publications in Nature and PLOS Global Public Health argue for gender-sensitive adaptations such as shaded community kitchens, hydration stations, and flexible work schedules. She leads the RAHAT (Women-led Responsive Actions for Heat Adaptation) initiative in Jodhpur, which co-designs passive-cooling prototypes and resilience networks with local women.

She has studied climate-responsive housing in India, demonstrating that compact, poorly ventilated slum-rehabilitation housing traps heat and degrades indoor air quality, with health and productivity consequences; she advocates for cross-ventilation, reflective roofs, and shaded courtyards. Extending this work globally, she has explored how orientation and material choices influence thermal comfort and energy use in Ethiopia and Bhutan.

A Nature Communications Earth & Environment meta-analysis led by Bardhan synthesised tree-based cooling effects across climate zones, showing that species traits, background climate, and urban form jointly dictate cooling performance, informing city greening and heat-action plans. Her team also applies remote sensing and deep learning to quantify shaded corridors and simulate tree-shade performance in dense urban environments for planning applications.

To support energy equity and net-zero transitions, Bardhan co-develops AI models that predict domestic energy use and prioritise retrofit candidates from neighbourhood to national scale. She has used thermal imagery and energy-performance data to map retrofit opportunities in Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her group also investigates how temperature, light, and layout influence productivity in hybrid offices, informing people-centred design guidelines.

She leads and collaborates on several interdisciplinary programmes linking architecture, health, and data science, including:

• HEROES (Heat Exposure, Resilience and Optimisation for Equitable Spaces) – assessing heat stress and productivity in Indian cities.
• HOME (Heat, Occupancy, Materials and Energy) – investigating heat loss and comfort in domestic buildings.
• HD4 (Health-Driven Design for Cities) – a collaboration in Singapore supported by the National Research Foundation exploring design strategies for population health and resilience.
• SHARE (Sustainable Health, Architecture and Resilience Equity) – examining gender, labour, and heat exposure.
• Emerging Extreme Heat in Rapidly Growing Indian Cities – a NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change (LCLUC)-funded study analysing how urban expansion affects heat exposure and public health.

Her research has been supported by the UK Space Agency, the European Space Agency, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the National Research Foundation Singapore. She has co-authored frameworks connecting urban design evidence to global climate policy, including a Nature Cities (2025) article linking local urban data to climate assessments and a Lancet Planetary Health (2024) roadmap on gender–climate–health integration ahead of COP29. Bardhan has been listed among the world’s top 2 % of scientists in her field.

Selected publications

Bardhan has authored and co-authored several book chapters and conference papers on sustainable architecture, thermal comfort, and low-income housing design in the Global South. Her contributions appear in volumes published by Routledge, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell, among others.

Book chapters

• Bardhan, R., & Pan, J. (2023). The Why? How? What? and What-ifs of Mass Slum Rehabilitation Housing in India. In G. Karunaratne (Ed.), Informal Settlements of the Global South (pp. 254–275). Routledge.
• Rajadhyaksha, A., Sunikka-Blank, M., Bardhan, R., & Schupp, J. (2022). Indian Cinema as a Database for Socio-Energy Behavior in Chawls. In F. Penz & J. Schupp (Eds.), The Everyday in Visual Culture (Vol. 121). Routledge.
• Malik, J., & Bardhan, R. (2021). Integrating Occupant Behaviour in Thermal Comfort Assessment of Low-Income Dwellings. In U. Iyer-Raniga (Ed.), Sustainability in the Built Environment in the 21st Century: Lessons Learned from India and the Region (pp. 75–88). Springer.
• Malik, J., Bardhan, R., & Banerji, P. (2021). Understanding the Effect of Occupant Behaviour on Thermal Comfort and Energy Use in Slum Rehabilitation Housing. In A. Jana & P. Banerji (Eds.), Urban Science and Engineering (pp. 287–295). Springer.
• Sarkar, A., & Bardhan, R. (2021). Analysing the Impact of Interior Design on Indoor Ventilation in Low-Income Housing of Mumbai. In A. Jana & P. Banerji (Eds.), Urban Science and Engineering (pp. 251–262). Springer.
• Sarkar, A., Kumar, N., Jana, A., & Bardhan, R. (2021). Association Between Built-Environment and Livability: Case of Mumbai Slum Rehabs. In A. Jana & P. Banerji (Eds.), Urban Science and Engineering (pp. 63–74). Springer.
• Bardhan, R., Jana, A., & Sarkar, S. (2019). Informality. In A. M. Orum (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of Urban and Regional Studies (pp. 1–22). Wiley-Blackwell.

Conference papers

• Bardhan, R., & Debnath, R. (2018). Evaluating Building Material-Based Thermal Comfort of a Typical Low-Cost Modular House in India. Materials Today: Proceedings, 5(1), 311–317. * Bardhan, R. (2018). Gender Equality Through Design in Low-Income Communities – A Case Study of SRA in Mumbai. Presented at the Gender Colloquium: Gender Issues in Urban Transformation, Mumbai, 23–24 August 2018. * Bardhan, R., & Debnath, R. (2017). Investigating Building Energy Performance with Site-Based Airflow Characteristics in Wind-Driven Naturally Ventilated Conditions in Low-Income Tenement Housing of Mumbai. Presented at the 6th International Conference on Advances in Energy Research, Mumbai, 12–14 December 2017. * Malik, J., & Bardhan, R. (2017). User Experience and Perception in First Generation Green Rated Office Buildings in India. Presented at the 6th International Conference on Advances in Energy Research, Mumbai, 12–14 December 2017. * Sathyakumar, V., Ramsankaran, R. A. A. J., & Bardhan, R. (2017). Multiscale Analysis of the Relationship Between Socio-Economic Status and Remotely Sensed Spatial Patterns of Urban Green Spaces in Mumbai, India. Presented at the 38th Asian Conference on Remote Sensing (ACRS), New Delhi, 23–27 October 2017.

References

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