Usha Iyer-Raniga

Usha is a Professor at the School of Property, Construction and Project Management at RMIT University. She is also the

Co-Lead of the Circular Built Environment (CBE) working group, Global Alliance for Buildings and Construction (GlobalABC), hosted by UNEP. She was Co-lead of the United Nations One Planet Network’s (OPN) Sustainable Buildings and Construction Programme (SBC) (10YFP) on Sustainable Consumption and Production aligned with SDG12 from 2015-22. Globally, the SBC program was the first to work on circular built environment, and its mapping with the SDGs. Related SDGs are 12, 8, 7, 15, 13, 6 and 17. 

Usha brings wide industry experience to her teaching and research. She has been involved in key projects on sustainability and circularity in the built environment since her commencement at RMIT University at the Centre for Design. She has been invited as key note speaker and invited speaker at National and International Conferences. She has been involved as an expert in panel discussions for Australian government and industry. She is Board member for various NGOs and on advisory committees for various industry organisations. Her research projects include national and international projects.

Usha is the founder of the Circular Economy Hub@RMIT. She is also founding member of the CERN APAC (Circular Economy Research Network Asia Pacific) with RMIT University, Monash University,  CSIRO and Swinburne University and has been chairing CERN APAC since 2024. Usha's recent research in circular economy has been as Director of the Integrated Circular Economy, Climate Change and Clean Energy Platform (IC3P) and Director of the Victorian Circular Activator. She has been involved in informing CSIRO's circular economy roadmap and been on the steering committee of the Australian Circular Economy (ACE Hub) Circularity conferences in Australia. 

Usha started working in the field of energy efficiency and conservation since the late eighties. This has now broadened to encompass sustainability and circularity issues in the built environment. She commenced working in this field on maximising daylighting in office buildings as part of her Masters’ thesis, which she completed in the early nineties. She has worked in architectural practices in India, Canada and Australia, bringing practical knowledge of energy efficiency and conservation, and triple bottom line sustainability to buildings and the built environment.

Usha completed her Doctorate thesis in Australia in the late nineties and worked in private consulting and government before re-commencing her career in academia. Her work in private consulting and government was focused on tool development and matters pertaining to introduction of regulatory compliance for energy efficiency measures in the residential and commercial building sectors in Australia.