Thanos Tzempelikos, Professor in the Lyles School of Civil Engineering and Ray W. Herrick Labs, has been awarded the prestigious Leon Gaster Award from the Society of Light and Lighting as a co-author of the paper, "Cross-validation and robustness of daylight glare metrics", published in the esteemed journal Lighting Research and Technology in November 2019. The award was presented at the Society’s Annual Awards evening on December 3, 2020 in London. The paper was led by Dr. Jan Wienold of EPFL.

This research was a collaborative effort by 13 scientists from seven research groups. Experimental datasets of daylight-dominated workplaces in office test rooms were collected in six different countries (Argentina, Germany, Denmark, Israel, Japan and USA). The authors evaluated the performance and robustness of twenty-two established and newly proposed daylight glare prediction models using novel statistical methods. The variability in experimental setups, geographical location and research teams allowed a reliable evaluation of the daylight glare models for daylight-dominated workplaces, by also defining new performance metrics and robustness measures. The outcomes of this work allow further insights into human visual comfort and daylight glare to support comfortable indoor environments and human-centered building design and operation.

The Leon Gaster Award is awarded annually by the Society of Light and Lighting for the best paper of the year, concerned with lighting applications, and recognizes the role that Leon Gaster made as the founder of the British Illuminating Engineering Society in 1909, which is the forerunner of the Society of Light and Lighting. The award was first made in 1929.

Official announcement of the award winner with link to paper:
https://journals.sagepub.com/page/lrt/collections/awardwinners

EPFL announcement:
https://actu.epfl.ch/news/daylight-glare-study-across-four-continents-gets-l/

Direct link to paper:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1477153519826003