This event took place on Tuesday 18 February 2025.
This was an in-person event: a site visit to PEARL to experience the setup for an experiment on how upper deck sunroofs and tinted solar films affect passenger thermal comfort in a double-deck bus in winter.
The Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) is a unique, flexible facility to explore ways in which people interact with their environment. It offers an extensively customisable laboratory space, to engage and study the senses. Lighting, sound, smell and physical features can all be controlled to create unique, real-scale experiences, test environments and study the brain and senses. PEARL’s vision is to create a better world in which people and the environment can thrive together in a mutually beneficial, safe, equitable and healthy way.
Speakers:
Nick Tyler CBE FREng
Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL and the Director of the UCL Centre for Transport Studies.
Using his musician background, Nick combines highly diverse fields in his research and teaching, from science and engineering through to performing arts and policy. To do this he has created a £50M massive (44,000m3) multiscale multisensorial Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) to allow him and his team to study the interactions of environments, people and their activities at life-scale, from axons and dendrites to complex urban environments and vehicles. This approach is a new way of examining how people perceive the environment, using a combination of theoretical neurobiology, neuroscience, psychology, physiology, engineering and creative arts to inform the synthesis of these results to create new ways of designing safe, accessible, aesthetic, effective and energy-beneficial environments that work for both people and planet. This has resulted in changes in design of buses, trains, stations, streets and pedestrian facilities around the world.
Nick is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, and the Royal Society of Arts, was appointed CBE in 2011, and awarded the CIHT Institution Award in 2022.