Dr. Seungjae Lee (Ph.D. '19) started as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering at the University of Toronto (ranked in the top 10 engineering schools worldwide) in July 2021. Seungjae completed his PhD in the Architectural Engineering emphasis area of Civil Engineering. He was advised by Prof. Thanos Tzempelikos and Prof. Panagiota Karava. In 2020-2021 he was a post-doctoral fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Seungjae's Ph.D. Thesis was entitled “Development of self-tuned indoor thermal environments”. He developed innovative concepts for intelligent and self-tuned building energy systems, based on novel machine learning techniques and optimal control algorithms for human operating conditions. This pioneer work, core of a large NSF grant, included experiments with human subjects using novel interfaces and feedback mechanisms; efficient Bayesian inference algorithms for online learning of personal thermal preference and behavioral profiles; integration of human preferences into stochastic optimal control frameworks; and demonstration of a self-tuned optimal HVAC controller in real buildings, combining model-predictive control, energy modeling and human preference-learning algorithms.

During his PhD, Seungjae participated in the development of large successful NSF proposals, collaborated with industry partners within the Center for High Performance Buildings at Purdue, and was the vice-chair of the 5th International High Performance Buildings Conference at Purdue in 2018. He is the recipient of the Andrews Fellowship at Purdue, a best paper award at the 4th International High Performance Buildings Conference in 2016 and the prestigious ASHRAE Grant-in-Aid Award in 2017.