Dusan Licina

Dusan Licina (born 1986 in Belgrade, Serbia) is an engineer and researcher specialized in indoor air quality, building Ventilation (architecture)|ventilation and human exposure. He is a professor at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne|EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) and head of the Human-Oriented Built Environment Laboratory.
==Career==
Licina received a B.Sc. in 2008 and a M.Sc. in 2010 in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Belgrade. During this time, he specialized in the study of Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning|Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning (HVAC) systems. In 2015, he received a joint Doctor of Philosophy|PhD degree from the National University of Singapore (School of Design and Environment) and the Technical University of Denmark (International Centre for Indoor Environment and Energy). His PhD thesis, titled 'Human convective boundary layer and its impact on personal exposure' contributed to the improved understanding of airflow characteristics around the human body, personal exposure to airborne pollutants indoors and ventilation control.
Upon completion of his PhD, Licina moved to the University of California, Berkeley as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of William W. Nazaroff. During his postdoctoral career, Licina focused on investigating sources and transport of air pollutants in buildings and inhalation exposure assessment. He then served as the director of the Standard Development team at the International WELL Building Institute (IWBI) in New York. During this time, he led the development of the Air and Thermal Comfort Concepts within the WELL v2 green building certification standard, a global standard for healthy buildings applied in more than 65 countries.
Licina joined EPFL in June 2018 as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of Indoor Environmental Quality at the School for Architecture, Civil, and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), and has since served as director of the Human-Oriented Built Environment Laboratory at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne|EPFL, also part of the Smart Living Lab and located in Fribourg.
==Research==
Licina has made original contributions to the field of civil and environmental engineering. His research laboratory focuses on air quality engineering, emphasizing the need for high indoor environmental quality for building occupants with minimum energy consumption. His research aims to better understand the physics and chemistry associated with concentrations, dynamics and fates of air pollutants within buildings, and development and application of methods to study relationships between air pollution sources and consequent human inhalation exposures. In addition, his laboratory has been engaged in optimization of building ventilation systems based on a paradigm shift from traditional system-centric to human-centric ventilation controls. This research is pursued through combination of laboratory and field experiments, modeling, data analysis, and at times numerical simulations.
Some of Licina’s notable research contributions include understanding of contributions of human skin and clothing to the concentration and diversity of indoor chemicals and particulate matter, including bioaerosols, and their contribution to indoor inhalation burden.
== Recognition ==
Licina is the recipient of the Ralph G. Nevins award by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). Work of his research group has been awarded with three conference awards at the Healthy Building 2021. He is an editorial board member of the Indoor Air and Atmosphere journals.
He has frequently appeared on media outlets, for example during the COVID-19 pandemic as an expert on airborne pathogen transmission mechanisms on the Swiss television RTS, in the Swiss newspaper 20 minutes (Switzerland)|20 min, on the new portal Heidi.News, and on matters related to indoor air quality in Mirage News and Tech Explorist. He also gave a lecture on April 2021 workshop series organized by the US National Academy of Sciences on the state-of-the-science on exposure to PM2.5|PM2.5 indoors, its health impacts and engineering approaches and interventions to reduce exposure risks, including practical mitigation solutions in residential settings.
Category:1986 births
Category:Serbian academics
Category:University of Belgrade alumni