Making the invisible visible: UB lab links data to design

Amidst the high-powered drones, thermal cameras, and heat guns stacked in the office of Mohamed Aly Etman, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, and director of UB’s Building and Environment Visualization Lab (BEVL), sits a children’s bike – his daughter’s.

The juxtaposition serves as a metaphor of sorts for the heady, high-tech work Aly Etman and his team conduct with these tools to visualize data on climate and the built environment, and its ultimate purpose on the ground — shaping a healthier, lower-carbon and more resilient planet for future generations.

Since joining UB in 2024 as the inaugural director of BEVL, Aly Etman, an architectural designer and building sciences expert, has reached into fields as wide as geography, public health and computer science to apply big data tools and techniques in immersive visualization, computational design and real-time data collection to advance sustainable architecture, urban resilience, and inclusive design.

“The goal is to advance a more resilient environment by making conditions such as heat, shade, air quality, humidity, accessibility and building performance — and qualities such as climate resilience, ecosystem health and social equity — visible, understandable and actionable,” says Aly Etman, who came to UB from the Yale Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, where he developed SEVA, or Socio-Ecological Visual Analytics, an interactive dashboard that synthesizes socio-ecological, health and building system data to support more sustainable development.

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.

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 Authority, 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 School of Architecture and Planning Dean Julia Czerniak to reimagine UB’s South Campus as a socio-ecologically integrated and climate resilient landscape.

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.

Aly Etman advances BEVL’s work with a team of six student assistants. Among them is Khushi Singh, a recent computer science graduate and BEVL research assistant who is volunteering her time to develop an online climate-and-weather visualization tool, making climate and weather information easier to explore in design and research.

Siavash Karimi, a student in UB’s MArch/MBA program, originally came to BEVL to borrow thermal cameras for his MArch thesis exploring outdoor thermal comfort on UB’s North Campus through simulations of solar access, shade, and wind experiences.

“At BEVL, I learned to build the site itself and then run the sun, shade and wind through it,” he says. “Now, when I put a tree or a wall on a plan, I can say what it does to someone on that sidewalk. I don’t think I can go back to designing without it.”

Fahed Sayej, a Fulbright scholar pursuing his MSRED, came to BEVL last year with an interest in exploring the intersection of digital technology and the built environment and today finds himself developing new lines of research on the impacts of emerging technologies, including AI, advanced visualization, and spatial analysis on the real estate development, architecture and historic preservation professions.

“This research demonstrates that immersive technologies deliver concrete results: enhanced stakeholder engagement, accelerated decision-making processes, and improved financial outcomes in real estate transactions and development,” says Sayej, who is now collaborating with Aly Etman and Matthew Roland, clinical assistant professor of urban planning and director of real estate development programs, on a national survey on the adoption of AI tools across the real estate field.

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.

For Climate Ready Corridors, BEVL is working with the Rudy Bruner Center (RBC) and the Design for Resilient Environments Lab (DRE Lab) to develop a heat-mapping and scenario-testing workflow that combines ecological data, climate projections, and design alternatives to model heat conditions and test climate-responsive streetscape strategies.

“We’re recreating the built environment in the computer to the level of the size and coverage of a tree, both to understand current conditions and to test ideas to mitigate heat stress,” says Aly Etman, who is working with Lauren Ames Fischer, director of research for RBC and assistant professor of urban planning, and Kristine Stiphany, director of the DRE Lab and assistant professor of architecture, on the research and teaching collaboration.

Ultimately, the New York State DEC-funded effort will compile student design ideas and research findings into a statewide design guide for reducing the impacts of extreme heat.

Advancing this research alongside Aly Etman is Mahsa Saharkhiz, a research assistant who recently graduated from the MSRED program and is now pursuing her master’s in geography at UB. Her role is to build an open workflow that turns raw LiDAR data into 3D maps of neighborhoods with details such as building roof heights and tree crown sizes, enabling analyses that show which streets trap heat and where trees cool things down.

“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.

BEVL is expanding its capacity to document, model and visualize environments through new tools and expertise in 3D object scanning, handheld LiDAR, aerial imaging, AI-supported data processing, virtual and augmented reality, motion capture and immersive projection.

Such capabilities have already been put into practice. A spring 2026 teaching partnership with Nicholas Bruscia, assistant professor of architecture, and adjunct instructor Timothy Noble, supported a studio investigating digitization techniques for design with reused stone materials. With assistance from BEVL, the studio was able to use advanced scanning tools to scan approximately 85 stone blocks salvaged from demolished buildings and roads for incorporation into their project model.

For an ecological practices technical methods seminar taught by Joyce Hwang, professor of architecture, Aly Etman helped students apply tools like acoustics and thermal sensors to their documentation of environmental data and technical methods for multi-species design.

The architecture program’s core courses on environmental systems, which teach students how buildings interact with climate, energy, and human comfort, have integrated BEVL’s tools and equipment throughout its curriculum.   

The growing toolkit raises larger questions that Aly Etman says will guide future research and educational directions.

“Ultimately, we are interested in developing methods that help people understand complex environmental systems and participate more meaningfully in shaping them as resilient spaces and places,” he says.