Luis Santos

Luis Santos is an architect and researcher concerned in creating bridges between architectural practice and research on building performance and simulation, generative design and indoor environmental quality. He collaborated with several design studios in Lisbon, Portugal, where he was responsible for the design of energy-efficient buildings.

He holds a Master of Architecture from Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon (IST-UL). He continued to pursue his research endeavors in a Ph.D. at UC Berkeley – College of Environmental Design. His doctoral dissertation at Berkeley presents new modeling methods for goal-oriented design procedures based on thermal and daylight simulations. His work explores new digital approaches to generate effective surrogate building models for thermal and daylight simulations and to implement heuristics that simplify search procedures in building optimization and analysis.

Algorithmic and Generative Design are important components of Luis’ work. Since 2009, he collaborates with the Algorithmic Design for Architecture (ADA) group based at INESC-ID at IST-UL, particularly in developing interfaces between whole-building energy software and domain-specific programming languages for architecture. Recently, at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Grid Integration Group, he developed PyBEM, a small, python package for early-stage building energy simulation.

Lately, his research interests are focusing on developing tools for visual comfort assessments and the quantification of the non-visual effects of daylight in building occupants, as well as, using machine learning techniques to streamline performance-based design methods.

Luis is also an environmental design consultant. He collaborated with Loisos+Ubbelohde, an architecture firm based in Alameda, CA, specializing in daylight in buildings and building energy simulation and monitoring. He also provided sustainable design consultancy for different types of projects both in Europe and in the United States.