Postdoctoral Researcher - FCLG Operationalisation Project

The Singapore-ETH Centre was established in 2010 by ETH Zurich
- The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Singapore's National Research Foundation (NRF), as part of the NRF's CREATE campus. As ETH Zurich's only research centre outside of Switzerland, the centre has strengthened the research capacity of ETH Zurich to develop sustainable solutions to global challenges in Switzerland, Singapore and the surrounding regions.

Set in Asia, in a rapidly urbanising region, the Singapore-ETH Centre aims to provide practical solutions to some of the most pressing challenges on urban sustainability, resilience and health through its programmes:
Future Cities Lab Global (FCL Global) and Future Health Technologies (FHT).

The centre serves as an intellectual hub for research, bringing together principal investigators and researchers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds. To promote the exchange of ideas and expertise, our researchers actively collaborate with universities and research institutes and engage with industry and government agencies to translate knowledge to practical solutions to real‑world problems.

The 'Mind the density
- Quantifying design scenarios that soften high‑density living' project is a multi institutional and multi disciplinary project with researchers from the Singapore-ETH Centre, National University of Singapore, and the Singapore Management University.

Previous projects at the Singapore-ETH Centre targeted the lack of data convergence in urban planning and the application of the latest developments in geospatial data science to urban design and planning. Data commonly reside in silos (across different fields, agencies, and stakeholders), and analytical and AI methods do not fully exploit these multimodal datasets. Their research outputs tackled this problem directly by releasing open, converged datasets and developing methods that leverage different dimensions such as text, subjective indicators and imagery.

In addition, work on design data semantics enhanced the meaning of data science applications for particular urban design solutions and actions. Moreover, they also investigated how the built environment affects people's behaviour, cognition, perception and emotion. They focused on the human and building scale, examining how indoor and outdoor environments influence experience.

This project integrates these expertise to ope rationalise evidence on human responses to high‑density environments in Singapore. The project will generate large‑scale preference data across controlled design conditions, and will conduct focused empirical studies of behavioural, cognitive, physiological and subjective responses. This combined evidence will support agency decision‑making on design interventions that improve experience in high‑density environments, identify thresholds, compare interventions, and produce decision‑support evidence, planning parameters and implementation guidance.

Lead PI:
Filip Biljecki (NUS) and Zdravko Trivic (NUS)

As a postdoctoral researcher, you will be involved in a multidisciplinary and collaborative research study to ope rationalise human‑centred urban analytics and cognition methods as evidence‑backed decision support and implementation guidance for high‑density urban form and design interventions. You will integrate analytical methods to quantify how urban form and design interventions affect perception, cognition and behaviour, producing URA‑relevant guidance for high‑density environments.

You will also be involved in large‑scale field data collection through online surveys and lab‑based physiological studies, and collaborations with researchers from various disciplines and government agencies…