Tianzhen Hong

Mr. Hong is a Senior Scientist and Deputy Director for Research of the Building and Industrial Energy Systems Division of the US DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Before joining LBNL, he worked for Architectural Energy Corporation (former Eley Associates, now Noresco) in San Francisco, Supersymmetry in Singapore, National University of Singapore, and Tsinghua University, China. Mr. Hong has more than 30 years of industry and academic experience in building technologies, energy efficiency, thermal resilience, building performance modeling and simulation, building energy software, AI, machine learning, robotics, and occupant behavior in buildings. He is a key member of the team that developed building energy code and standards for California, ASHRAE, and India. He was the chief developer and product manager of VisualDOE version 4.0 – a comprehensive user interface to DOE-2.1E. He was the founding developer of DeST (former BTP) – a building simulation program used in China. He leads the EnergyPlus development at LBNL. He developed new and enhanced modeling capabilities of EnergyPlus and carried research to improve the usability of EnergyPlus for adoption in California Title 24 energy code. He leads the development of two building energy software which won two R&D 100 Awards (CBES in 2019 and CityBES in 2022). CityBES is an open data and computing platform for city buildings, energy, and sustainability. Mr. Hong is the Executive Editor of the Energy and Buildings journal, an IBPSA Fellow, an ASHRAE Fellow, a Highly Cited Researcher since 2021, a former member of IBPSA-USA board of directors, panel leader of ACEEE Summer Study conferences, and co-chair of 2026 ACEEE Summer Study on energy efficiency in buildings. Mr. Hong contributed to the International Energy Agency's research programs (Annex 53, 66, 79, 80, 81, 93). He co-led IEA EBC Annex 66, focusing on describing and modeling behaviors of building occupants to study their impacts on building energy performance and support the design and operation of buildings. He led projects under the 10-year US.-China Clean Energy Research Center for building energy efficiency. He established and chaired (Jan 2016 to June 2024) ASHRAE MTG.OBB now Technical Committee 7.10 Occupant Behavior in Building Design and Operation. He is the vice-chair of the recently established ASHRAE MTG on generative AI. He has published more than 250 journal articles in 40 journals. Details at his gScholar profile (https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=x5m2zBYAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate).