Fall Lecture Series 2025: Alpha Arsano PhD

Arsano is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and a building scientist at Northeastern University. Arsano’s research explores strategies to maximize low-carbon, equitable bioclimatic building strategies under current and future climatic conditions to maintain occupants’ comfort and health. She has been developing early-design stage analytical mythologies that can be combined with large-scale datasets on the building stock of the majority world where the highest population increase is anticipated. The goal is to identify design and technology solutions for vulnerable communities affected by global warming. Arsano developed a digital design tool, ClimaPlus, to promote building design that integrates bioclimatic strategies with technology to reduce carbon emissions in pursuit of a more sustainable and healthier environment. In an effort to make sustainable building design education accessible to a larger audience across the globe, the web-app has been used in a MOOC course on edX with over 50,000 learners from more than 170 countries. 

Arsano earned a SMArchS and a Ph.D. in building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a Presidential Fellow and recipient of the TODA Award. Her research work has been funded by the TATA Foundation and the MIT Energy Initiative. Before joining MIT, Arsano was an academic fellow at Transsolar Energietechnik, a climate engineering consultancy in Stuttgart, Germany, and interned at the architectural firm Allmann Sattler Wappner in Munich.