Marilyne Andersen

Biography

Marilyne Andersen is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and heads the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) that she launched in the Fall of 2010. Since April 2025, she is also the Director General of the GESDA foundation (Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator), whose mission is to anticipate emerging scientific discoveries and translate them into concrete actions for the benefit of society by engaging proactively with policymakers and diplomats.

She was Dean of the School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC) at EPFL from 2013 to 2018 and the Academic Director of the Smart Living Lab in Fribourg from 2018 to 2024. She also co-leads the Student Kreativity and Innovation Laboratory (SKIL) at ENAC since its launch in 2018. Before joining EPFL as a faculty, she was an Assistant Professor then Associate Professor tenure-track in the Building Technology Group of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and the Head of the MIT Daylighting Lab that she founded in 2004. She has also been Invited Professor at the Singapore University of Technology and Design in 2019.

Marilyne Andersen owns a Master of Science in Physics and specialized in daylighting through her PhD in Building Physics at EPFL in the Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) and as a Visiting Scholar in the Building Technologies Department of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California.

Her research lies at the interface between science, engineering and architectural design with a dedicated emphasis on the impact of daylight on building occupants. Focused on questions of comfort, perception and health and their implications on energy considerations, these research efforts aim towards a deeper integration of the design process with daylighting performance and indoor comfort, by reaching out to various fields of science, from chronobiology and neuroscience to psychophysics and computer graphics. She is leveraging this research in practice through OCULIGHT dynamics, a startup company she co-founded, which offers specialized consulting services on daylight performance and its psycho-physiological effects on building occupants.

She is the author of more than 250 papers published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences and the recipient of numerous grants and distinctions including the Daylight Award for Research as inaugural laureate at the international level (2016), fourteen publication awards (2005, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023) including the Taylor Technical Talent Award 2009 granted by the Illuminating Engineering Society and the EPFL prize of the Chorafas Foundation awarded to her PhD thesis in Sustainability (2005). Her research or teaching has been supported by professional, institutional and industrial organizations such as: the Swiss and the U.S. National Science Foundations, the Velux Foundation, the European Horizon 2020 program, the Boston Society of Architects, the MIT Energy Initiative, the Swiss Federal Office of Energy and InnoSuisse. She was the leader and faculty advisor of the Swiss Team and its NeighborHub project, who won the U.S. Solar Decathlon 2017 competition with 8 podiums out of 10 contests. In 2023, she co-curated the EPFL Pavilions exhibition at the interface between art and chronobiology entitled Lighten Up! On Biology and Time, in which she also featured as artist for the installation Circa Diem. Since 2022, she leads the multi-year SWICE project on the energy transition with the support of the Swiss Federal Office of Energy, that involves 10 Swiss higher education institutions and 30 partners from the public and private sectors to work on the need and acceptability of change in our future living and working places.
She is Vice-Chair of the Board of the Foundation Culture du Bâti (CUB) and of the ArtTech Foundation, and was member of the Board of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction from 2015 to 2024. She is expert to the Innovation Council of InnoSuisse, member of the Scientific Board of the EPFL-ECAL Lab, Founding member of the Daylight Academy and Strategic Advisory Board member of Innergia SA. She is also a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Building and Environment (Elsevier), LEUKOS (Illuminating Engineering Society) and Buildings and Cities (Taylor and Francis).