Yangxiaoxia Li
Yangxiaoxia Li is an architect and sustainably building engineer. In 2015, she studied for her Master's degree in Architecture at University of Southern California. During her time there, she obtained the LEED BD+C green building GA certification and became a mem-ber of the AIA. During her master's program, she participated in the Red Dot Design Competition and the DOE-Race to Zero green building competition, where she worked on designs for accessible interior spaces and a multi-family low-energy house.
Since 2017, Li has worked in Los Angeles, USA, and Shanghai, China. Her primary focus has been designing large commercial spaces and office buildings. In 2022, she
founded her own design studio in Shanghai, focusing on small-scale interior housing and commercial projects. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she recognized that sustainable architecture in China could not keep pace with the future demands of residents’ lifestyles and the goals of urban development. As a result, she decided to pursue a PhD to research sustainable and low-carbon architecture.
In her doctoral studies, Li’s primary research area is the embodied carbon emissions of building materials. Her research outcomes in the first two years include estimating the carbon savings achievable through material recycling, conducting a global assessment of embodied carbon emissions in buildings, and projecting technology-driven decarboniza-tion pathways up to 2050. This includes analyzing the impacts of technological develop-ment on existing mitigation potential, as well as optimizing and forecasting the trajecto-ries of new-build and renovation floor areas. In addition, she has explored methodologies and tools to support early-stage design decisions, applying machine learning to optimize design solutions.
Li is dedicated to providing policymakers with reference benchmarks, supporting archi-tects in optimizing low-carbon building solutions, and leveraging technology to transform design software. She also aspires to become a professor in the future, sharing the princi-ples of low-carbon architecture with more designers and stakeholders, and advancing the low-carbon building industry to a higher technological level.
Abstracts this author is presenting: