Nicola Willand

Dr Nicola Willand is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Property, Construction and Project Management, and a housing researcher who is interested in the interplay of housing, energy, health and equity.

As an architect by background, Nicola Willand approaches sustainability in the built environment holistically.

She finds that initiatives towards a more sustainable built environment tend to focus on environmental and economic outcomes, while the social aspects are often neglected.

To facilitate triple bottom line sustainability, Nicola aims to develop strategies for the built environment that will minimise environmental impacts and life cycle costs while maximising productivity, health and social equity.

Nicola's PhD explored the intersection of climate change mitigation as an opportunity for health and housing as a social determinant of health, and contributed to a better understanding of residential energy efficiency and health as a socio‐technical system. Subsequent qualitative and quantitative works have fnicolocussed on energy vulnerability, retrofit justice as the inequity of access to home energy efficiency improvements and articulating pathways of mitigation these social injustices

Nicola has also led teams who investigated how energy assistance could be integrated into the In-Home-Care system and how hidden energy poverty could be tackled through trusted intermediaries and interdisciplinary initiatives. Her British Academy Visting Fellowship explored the perceptions of essential energy in six European housing contexts. A current project uses mixed methods to understand how households balance electricity and gas use and how these practices are shaped. And the ongoing 'Towards climate resilient families…' project is aims to inform place-based, gender and culture informed approaches to protecting families during heat events.

Nicola regularly writes and talks about her research in the media and presents in public events to raise awareness of energy vulnerability in Australia and to advocate for better homes for all. Nicola is also a Trustee of the Fuel Poverty Research Network (https://www.fuelpovertyresearch.net/ ) that fosters collaborations among researchers, policy makers and practitioners on tackling energy poverty worldwide.

With regards to student education, Nicola is the course coordinator for the postgraduate 'Building Modelling and Simulation' course and the postgraduate transdisciplinary 'Housing & Health' elective. She also supervises 4th Year Construction Management students in writing their Honours thesis.

Nicola belongs to the following RMIT research groups:

Sustainable Building Innovation Laboratory (SBi Lab)
Centre for Urban Research (CUR)