Meet our faculty, Dr. Burak Gunay

Dr. Burak Gunay started his first appointment as a full-time faculty at Carleton University in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in 2017. Prior to this, he was a research associate at the National Research Council Canada (2016) and a Ph.D. student at Carleton University (2012-2016).

At Carleton, he established a research program on data-driven building operation and maintenance (DBOM), addressing major societal and environmental challenges related to climate change by improving energy efficiency in buildings. His approach to achieving energy efficiency in buildings is unique in that it focuses on the use of emerging data mining and machine learning techniques in tandem with domain knowledge in building science and energy modelling. He uses operational data gathered inside modern automation and control networks to learn from occupant behaviour and presence patterns. Using operational data, he employs inverse modelling to characterize building equipment operation and envelope performance. Methods developed by his research group have already been demonstrated on several real-world buildings, achieving a 20 to 40% reduction in heating, cooling, and ventilation-related energy use.

He led over a dozen partnership projects with controls, facilities management, software companies and federal research laboratories, raised over $2 million in research funding, formed a team of over ten researchers, and published over 150 papers. Eleven MASc, Ph.D., and PDF have successfully completed their research under his supervision – they all continue their professional careers in positions relevant to their projects in academia, government, and the private sector. In particular, he strives to form partnership projects bringing facility managers with the Canadian SMEs in the smart buildings domain. His research has been recognized by numerous prestigious awards such as the seven best paper awards, the Governor General’s Gold Medal, and the Carleton University Research Achievement Award. He is a subtask leader in an international task force on occupant-centric building design and operation (IEA EBC Annex 79). He has been an elected board member for the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) Canada since 2014.

He teaches Building Science and Green Building Design at the undergraduate level and Energy Modelling for Existing Buildings at the graduate level. These courses introduce methods for design, operation, and retrofit of energy efficient and sustainable buildings based on modern building energy codes, standards, and guidelines.