Climate Mitigation and Adaptation: Elevating the Scope from Buildings to Cities

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Mayuri Rajput:

Date: 26 Sept 2025
Time: 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT422

Climate Mitigation and Adaptation: Elevating the Scope from Buildings to Cities

Abstract

This seminar explores the symbiotic relationship between buildings, urban demographics, and their natural surroundings, with a specific focus on climate mitigation and resilience strategies, particularly operational carbon reduction and adaptation approaches for thermal comfort.

While these topics have often been studied in isolation, either at the scale of building technology or urban planning, such siloed approaches overlook the dynamic interactions between these scales and their cumulative impact on the environment and urban policy.

The seminar will address key themes including building and community decarbonization, resilience in the built environment, and climate adaptation at neighborhood and city scales. Methodological tools will include architectural engineering simulations, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and Machine Learning techniques.

Mayuri Rajput is a fellow at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, where her research focuses on building performance evaluation in a changing climate. She earned her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she investigated how urbanization affects building simulation outcomes and the uncertainties introduced into performance predictions.

Mayuri uses urban-scale building simulations to inform policy decisions in the areas of heat risk, energy poverty, and community solar planning. Her work on heat resilience in U.S. cities, particularly in quantifying heat exposure in building stock, has been featured in peer-reviewed journals, The New York Times, and CBS News. Most recently, her research on building retrofits was highlighted in The Washington Post article “Which home energy upgrades will save you money? We did the math,” co-authored with Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor at MIT.

At the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she taught the project-based seminar Buildings and Urban Intelligence, which trains students to develop digital twins of neighborhoods using fragmented data and GIS datasets. These digital models support long-term planning by allowing policymakers to test technology and urban design interventions.

With a bachelor’s in Electrical & Electronics Engineering and a master’s in Renewable Energy Engineering, Mayuri brings an interdisciplinary approach to her work at the intersection of urban building simulations, energy systems, and climate-adaptive, grid-interactive buildings.