Today, BEVL is behind a growing portfolio of funded research projects, teaching collaborations and proposal development that bring datasets like NASA satellite imagery and building sensor outputs to studies in streetscape design for extreme heat, community health and indoor air quality, biodiversity and multi-species design, housing performance and affordability, food equity and data sovereignty, and automated construction.

“The most important outcome of these collaborations is that they change the questions we ask,” says Aly Etman, who earned his PhD in architectural sciences at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), where he worked with computer scientists and semantic web experts to develop the framework for SEVA. “Through creative connections with new disciplines, we can connect design education with larger research inquiries involving climate, ecology, public health, urban systems, and community engagement.”

With grant activity connected to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the National Science Foundation, the New York State Energy Research and Development Association, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research, BEVL is deeply embedded in the UB’s transdisciplinary research landscape.

At the School of Architecture and Planning, Aly Etman has linked with the Center for Inclusive Design and Environmental Access to support its $5 million federal Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center award with research that uses environmental sensors, and thermal occupant comfort analysis to evaluate the effects of design features on comfort for neurodivergent people.

When the UB Regional Institute was looking for guidance on how to visualize the benefits of trees in urban environments for its work on Buffalo Street Trees, a city-led community education and tree-planting effort in the city’s underserved areas, they turned to BEVL. Using thermal camera images and before-and-after canopy visualizations, Aly Etman and his team helped UBRI create educational social media videos that show how trees cool neighborhoods. “The central message was that a tree is not only a visual or ecological element. Its shade can measurably change surface temperatures and the experience of a street,” Aly Etman says.

A collaboration with Henry Louis Taylor, professor of urban planning and co-director of UB’s Community Health Equity Research Institute, will support that center’s research on housing and public health on the East Side of Buffalo. With seed funding from UB, Aly Etman and his team will install and monitor a series of indoor air quality monitors in houses within the Upper Broadway Filmore neighborhood, most of them awaiting renovations, to pinpoint sources of indoor pollution, from poor ventilation to off-gassing building materials.

Working with Samina Raja, professor of urban planning and PI of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab, BEVL is a key collaborator on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to support equitable food systems through more accessible community data. The charge, to study existing community-facing food systems dashboards and develop data-equity guidelines with community partners, has introduced him to on-the-ground considerations like data access, privacy, and ownership.

“The idea is not to just develop another dashboard, but to work closely with the people who will use the dashboard and figure out how this vast network of community agencies wants to own, govern, and maintain their data,” says Aly Etman. “One of the main lessons is that data should support public dialogue and design exploration rather than replace community knowledge.”

Meanwhile, the BEVL team discovered new applications for LiDAR remote sensing data through its development of supporting visualizations for UB’s Resilient Campus Design Competition, launched in 2025 by Dean Julia Czerniak to reimagine UB’s South Campus as a socio-ecologically integrated and climate resilient landscape. The technique combined drone footage with the LiDAR scans to create an immersive base map that would allow the seven participating teams to reimagine the campus amidst climate-related scenarios like rising energy demand and increased extreme weather events. Also in support of the competition, BEVL collaborated with Lamarr.ai to assess building-envelope performance through AI-assisted analysis of thermal and visual imagery, helping inform resilient retrofit priorities.

BEVL is also supporting research by Mariam Ali, adjunct instructor in architecture, on immersive-VR visualizations of Cairo’s Tahrir Square, allowing users to navigate seven pivotal historical moments and encounter the square’s changing architectural, urban and political character. Presented at a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology symposium honoring architect Nasser Rabbat, the project treats immersive visualization as a method of critical historiography.

Beyond the School of Architecture and Planning, BEVL is establishing a network with faculty from UB’s School of Public Health and Health Professions, the College of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, the Institute for Learning Sciences, and the Center for Climate Change and Health Equity. Seeking interdisciplinary connections is embedded in BEVL’s DNA, Aly Etman says, helping the lab bring design, health, data science, and learning perspectives to complex environmental questions.

Sayej also turned his summer internship at the Broadway-Fillmore Neighborhood Housing Services, where he supported affordable housing design with advanced visualization, into a new research project for BEVL. Working with the nonprofit and local historic preservation agencies, BEVL is proposing to develop visualizations of Buffalo’s historic architecture using laser scanning and mapping technologies.

Nathan Valesky (MUP ’27) recently joined the lab to advance his research interests in planning healthy and sustainable green spaces in urban environments. Using ArcGIS Pro and census tract data, he’s visualizing the relationship of public park access to mental health across Buffalo. A second project involves a collaboration with the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy and the installation of temperature and relative humidity sensors throughout Delaware Park to examine how different types of land-cover influence microclimate conditions.

“At BEVL, our broader goal is to compile metrics like temperature, bird acoustic sensors, and drone-based identification of invasive species to develop a comprehensive approach for measuring urban biodiversity across neighborhoods. These data can provide valuable insights for future park design, environmental planning, and green infrastructure planning,” says Valesky.

Often, BEVL’s work lies at the intersection of research and teaching. BEVL supports the curriculum and creative practices by developing project-specific workflows that move from field capture to modeling, testing and communication. The following examples show how the lab adapts methods to the questions already driving studios and courses.

"I went from reading about LiDAR to writing the scripts that turn raw laser data into a city model," says Saharkhiz, who just presented her work with BEVL at the 2026 Cartography and Geographic Information Society conference. "Professor Etman puts students in the same room with computer scientists, architects, urban planners, and state agency partners, and expects us to hold our own. You do not get that from coursework. It is the reason I think of myself as a researcher now, not only as a student."

BEVL is also backing Kissing Bridge I and II, a two-part studio taught by Gregory Delaney, clinical associate professor of architecture, and Stephanie Cramer, clinical assistant professor of architecture and director of the Fabrication Workshop, with a site-documentation workflow that moves from satellite LiDAR to handheld LiDAR, drones and 360 cameras, helping students translate topography, buildings, and tree cover into shared models for design development.

“Our studio and seminar collaborations have shown that BEVL is most valuable when it is integrated into the curriculum as a collaborative resource with guidance – not simply as a collection of technologies,” says Aly Etman. “Faculty and students bring design questions and site-based observations that help shape how the tools are used.”

Last Fall, BEVL invited students across UB to test its thermal cameras, heat guns, infrared thermometers, and humidity data loggers to compare thermal comfort experiences on paved versus planted surfaces as part of Park(ing) Day, a campus event organized collaboratively with the Rudy Bruner Center to help rethink how we allocate street space for vehicles.

Aly Etman says virtual and augmented reality help students explore proposals at human scale and communicate evidence during reviews. BEVL is extending these methods through faculty workshops and a planned winter 2026–27 study abroad program with the American University in Cairo, subject to final approval and enrollment.