| Doctoral Seminar on Sustainability Research in the Built Environment (DOWNLOAD THE CALL HERE)

The DS2BE is a joint initiative of research groups working on sustainability issues at 8 Belgian universities: ULBruxelles, VUBrussel, KULeuven, UCLouvain, ULiège, UHasselt, UAntwerpen and UGent.

Conceived as a platform for PhD researchers whose work engages the built environment at different scales in the framework of sustainability, these seminars provide an excellent opportunity for the doctoral students of the partner institutions to present their ongoing research. They will get feedback from a broad panel of sustainability experts, including invited specialists and peers, for furthering their research.

During the DS2BE-2017, we will have two keynote speaker presentations to provide insights from the academic and professional world on ‘urban green infrastructure and biodiversity‘. The invited speakers for this round are:

During the course of the next DS2BE-2017, this will be a two-day event on 26-27 April 2017 in Liège. For both the short and long sessions, the PhD candidates can provide submissions that concern topics, such as:

- Sustainable Architecture and Resources, materials, re-cycling /re-use, building elements and envelope, building physics, building construction technology, building renovation, drawing lessons from vernacular, bioclimatic design, regenerative design, biomimetic and integrated design, …,
- Sustainability theory, sustainability / environmental assessment at building and neighborhood scales, and at the scale of city and regions,
- Sustainable urbanism, urban form, landscape and urban ecology, urban green infrastructure and ecosystem services, public space, density, urban infrastructure & transportation, water urbanism, retrofitting of buildings to the built environment,
- Methodologically oriented PhDs focusing on issues related to LCA (Life Cycle Analysis), I-O (Input-Output Analysis), MFA (Material Flow Analysis), simulation techniques, to exploring urban metabolism, industrial ecology, environmental modelling, GIS-based land-use change modelling, to Research by Design.

We invite two types of presentations differentiated along the stage of the PhD research:

Short Presentation / Poster session: PhD researchers at the beginning of their research (1st -2nd year of PhD) are invited to make a presentation and exhibition of their work in the form of a poster (A0 size). Candidates for this session are required to submit a draft poster before the deadline and the consent of their Supervisor(s). Each presentation will be given 10 minutes; 5’ for a concise presentation followed by 5’ of feed-back.

Long Presentation / Paper Session: PhD researcher at an advanced stage (3rd - 4th year of PhD) are invited to present a substantial part (case study, draft article or thesis chapter) of their research in the form of a full paper. Candidates for this session must submit an abstract of 300 words in English. Upon acceptance, they will be required to submit a full paper of 4000 words. The paper will be reviewed while providing written feedback to the PhD researcher via email. The paper will not be published to keep the paper confidential. This allows further development of the manuscript by the author after the seminar in order to be submitted as a journal paper or thesis chapter or even international conference paper. The added value of submitting a full paper is mainly related to the constructive feedback provided in a written format and the interactive feedback after presentation.

All draft posters, abstracts and full papers will be reviewed by a scientific committee, consisting of senior researchers from the partner institutions. A book of proceedings will be published containing the extended abstracts.