Rate My Professor Ronita Bardhan

Professor Ronita Bardhan BArch, MCP, MA, PhD (Urban Engineering) is Professor of Sustainable Built Environment and Health in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Cambridge Sustainable Design Group. She is also Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Fellow and Director of Studies in Architecture at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and holds visiting and associate positions in Cambridge Public Health, Centre for Science and Policy, Cambridge Zero, and Cambridge Global Challenges. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor and founding faculty member of the Centre for Urban Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Shimizu Visiting Professor at Stanford University, and was nominated to represent IIT Bombay on India's Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs Affordable Housing Policy committee in 2015. Bardhan earned her PhD in Urban Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2013, Master's in City Planning from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, and BArch. Her research triangulates environmental data, building physics, epidemiology, social sciences, machine learning, and AI to develop context-specific interventions for precision population health in climate-vulnerable settings, including gender-inclusive climate adaptation, decarbonisation algorithms for UK buildings, and studies on social housing in India, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, and Brazil.

Bardhan's scholarly impact is evidenced by over 5,262 citations and an h-index of 42 on Google Scholar. Key publications include 'Factor in gender to beat the heat in impoverished settlements' (Nature, 2024), 'Identifying Hard-to-Decarbonize houses from multi-source data in Cambridge, UK' (Sustainable Cities and Society, 2024), 'Lethal heatwaves are challenging India’s sustainable development' (PLOS Climate, 2023), and 'A Global Building Occupant Behavior Database' (Nature Scientific Data, 2022). Ranked among the top 2% of scientists globally, she was a Top 50 Women in Engineering Finalist in the UK (2024). She chairs committees including Research Ethics (2023-2025) and previously Equality and Diversity (2021-2023) in the Department of Architecture, and serves on steering committees for Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery, Environmental Sustainability Strategy, and Healthcare Innovation. As Associate Editor of Urban Climate (Elsevier) and on editorial boards of Environmental Research: Health (IOP), Nature Scientific Reports, Habitat International, and others, her work informs policy for the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and IPCC, with media coverage in BBC, TIME, and CNN.