Zoltan Nagy

Zoltán Nagy is a Full Professor and Chair of Building Services at TU Eindhoven and founder of the Intelligent Environments Laboratory. Previously Assistant Professor at UT Austin (2016-2024), he brings a unique background in mechanical engineering and robotics to building science. His research interests span from individual occupant behavior to city-scale energy analysis, bridging scales from people to buildings to communities through interdisciplinary research with the goal for a sustainable energy transition.

He is a fellow of IBPSA World (IBPSA: Int'l Building Performance Simulation Association) and has received the Outstanding Researcher Award from IBPSA-USA in 2022, several Best Paper awards from the CISBAT conference, Building & Environment journal, as well as a Highest Cited Paper award from Applied Energy. He organized and chaired the workshops on Reinforcement Learning for energy management in buildings and cities (RLEM) as well as the CityLearn Challenges 2020-2023.

Prior to joining UT, Dr. Nagy was a senior scientist at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, in the Department of Architecture, working in the Architecture & Building Systems research group on control systems for sustainable building operation, as well as wireless sensor networks and applications of machine learning in building retrofit. Dr. Nagy has co-founded the award-winning high-tech spin-off Femtotools in 2007, and was member of its board of directors until 2011.

Dr. Nagy received a PhD in robotics in 2011 working in the MultiScale Robotics Lab of Prof. Brad Nelson, and an MSc in Mechanical Engineering (2006) with a focus on micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and robotics, both from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He spent an academic exchange semester at the Danish Technical University in 2005, and was a visiting researcher in the Distributed Robotics Laboratory of Prof. Daniela Rus at MIT in 2009.