Professor Jonathon Taylor is dedicated to making future homes healthier and more sustainable

What are your main research interests?

Basically, I work on issues related to climate change and health, with a particular focus on housing. Housing is a critical environment for our health, because people spend more time at home than anywhere else. My main research interests involve studying exposure to environmental hazards such as heat, cold and air pollution inside people’s homes. Older adults or small children are the most vulnerable to negative health effects from these exposures. 

What sets me apart is that I tend to do this at the population level, examining how cities and countries can adapt the housing stock to future environmental challenges and support healthier, more sustainable living environments. 

I really love research! As a professor I don’t have much time to do my own research but I’m leading a 10-person Urban Physics Group at Tampere University. I still get a big kick of excitement from being one of the first ones to witness a new discovery or finding.

What makes your research significant?

People’s living environment can have a significant impact on how they experience, for example, the record-breaking heatwaves of recent summers in Europe. Due to their design, some homes get hotter than others; some households can afford air conditioners, some cannot. In some parts of the world, the solid fuels some people use for cooking and heating contribute to major health risks for them, but the resulting air pollution impacts everyone.

At the same time, housing accounts for around a quarter of final energy consumption in Europe and 20% globally, making it a critical area for addressing emissions and climate change. Housing and household energy are therefore closely linked to both environmental sustainability and public health.

Helping people make informed decisions about how homes are built and renovated will be critical for addressing climate change and adapting to future conditions. It also offers significant opportunities to improve population health.

What would you like to study next and why?

I have more ideas than time, so there are plenty of opportunities to explore. So far in my career, I have focused on modelling cities, buildings and their surroundings using physics-based approaches. However, we are now seeing an enormous amount of big data emerging from sources such as IoT devices, including smart weather stations, and I am very excited about working more with data-driven models of cities.

AI is also helping us do more by enabling us to analyse increasingly complex datasets and make better use of the vast amounts of data collected from sensors across cities, even when that data is sometimes unreliable. For me, the most important thing is to continue focusing on key global challenges and finding ways to improve our urban environments in the future.

I’ve always been super interested in interdisciplinary or collaborative projects. What I enjoy most is working with different people and new ideas.

How do you see urban physics in the future?

For me, urban physics is part of a much bigger puzzle. We can estimate carbon emissions from homes, model environmental exposures, and even translate these into health impacts. However, without working with people who understand human behaviour, the models we develop and the scenarios we explore can be incomplete or misinformed. We need to understand what these exposures mean for people, how homes perform for different groups, and whether the benefits and risks are shared equally.

Similarly, we can model cities, but without engaging with policymakers, practitioners, and the cities themselves, those models risk remaining purely hypothetical. Stronger connections between disciplines are essential, and networks such as Tampere Urban Research Network for Sustainability - TURNS, which I now direct, can help support this collaboration. 

Photo: Jonne Renvall, Tampereen yliopisto

Where do you draw inspiration for your work as a professor?

I get a lot of joy from discovery and learning something new. When I was young, I could never decide whether I wanted to be an architect, a scientist or a doctor. I also spent a lot of time playing the old SimCity game, where you could build your own city and then see what happened to it, whether it was a flood, a Godzilla monster, or something else entirely.

Now that I am grown up, I get to work at the intersection of architecture, technology and health. I build models of real cities and explore both current and future environmental hazards and planning scenarios. Learning something new or developing ideas that could help cities adapt to future challenges is really exciting and a lot of fun.

What do you do in your free time?

I work too much, so I don’t have a lot of free time. I'm originally Canadian, and when I am back home, I like to ride horses and hike in the mountains. In Finland, I sometimes hike, bike and boulder. I live in Helsinki and love to go kayaking in the archipelago. But mostly I look after my kids, cat, and houseplants – in that order.