Research direction: Urban and building physical environments, Human-centered healthy living conditions, Urban colorimetry

Zhe Kong currently serves as Associate Professor of the Institute of Building Technology and Science at School of Architecture, Southeast University. She earned her Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. In addition, she is a standing member of the Indoor Environment Committee under the Chinese Illuminating Engineering Society.

For more than a decade, Associate Professor Kong has focused on the study of healthy human-centric lighting environments. By integrating disciplines such as urban design, architectural design, building physics, and human factors engineering, her research investigates the effects of lighting environments and visual stimuli on urban citizens within both cityscapes and built environments. Centered on public health considerations, she has developed a multidimensional evaluation framework and predictive model that address users’ psychological and physiological needs. Furthermore, she advances technological innovations in the measurement and simulation of lighting environments, thereby providing empirical and theoretical support for optimizing urban and architectural lighting conditions.

Dr. Kong is the principal investigator of a Young Scientists Fund project granted by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) as well as a subproject under the National Key R&D Program. She has also participated in three NSFC General Program projects. She contributed to the authoring of the nationally planned textbook Building Physics, and has published over twenty peer-reviewed academic papers in major international journals and conferences. Additionally, he holds three invention patents.