Illustrated building cross-section showing sensors, wearables, plants, air filters, mold, microplastics and airborne viruses in homes, offices, classrooms, a clinic and a basement

How Buildings Shape the People Inside Them

We study how indoor environments affect the health, comfort and work of the people inside them, using long-term sensing, field studies and AI.

About Us

Smart and Healthy Buildings at UVA brings together research and teaching on how buildings shape the health, comfort and productivity of the people inside them, and on how buildings can be designed and run with those people in mind. Our testbed, the Living Link Lab, has followed people and buildings in UVA's Link Lab since 2018. Beyond it, we study flood-related indoor exposures in Puerto Rico and rural Alaska and build digital twins, AI tools and low-power IoT systems.

The group is led by Arsalan Heydarian and Somayeh Asadi (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Brad Campbell (Computer Science), with affiliated faculty across UVA. The testbed supports five courses, including Smart and Healthy Buildings (CE 4070/6070) and CPS 1.

Contact Us

We are in the Link Lab, Room 268, Olsson Hall, at the University of Virginia. Email [email protected]. Students and collaborators are welcome to write with their interests.

News and Upcoming

Home visits in San Juan

News, October 5, 2026. Somayeh Asadi's team visited homes along San Juan's Caño Martín Peña to sample indoor air, drinking water and dust for Indoor Exposures in Puerto Rico.

Saja Alnusair at the Acoustical Society of America

Upcoming, December 17, 2026, Baltimore. Saja Alnusair presents her poster “Beyond Sound Level: Source Predictability and Multimodal Occupant Distraction in Office Soundscapes” at the 191st meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Living Link Lab by the Numbers

2018 Year the testbed began

Built with a National Science Foundation research infrastructure award.

See the Living Link Lab

5 Courses supported by the testbed

See our courses

500+ Students given research and learning opportunities

Learn about the testbed

15 PhD students

Meet the team