Dr. Vishal Garg is a University Chair Professor and the Director of Indorama Ventures Center for Clean Energy at Plaksha University, Mohali, India. He works on building energy efficiency with a focus on the use of building energy simulation for designing energy-efficient buildings and automation and controls for efficient operations. He is currently developing and field testing a Smart Home Energy Management System (SHEMS) to understand its impact on energy savings and demand reduction. This work also includes psychological evaluations and sociological approaches to understanding people’s energy behaviour. He is also involved in policy-making and market research of smart energy homes and is incubating a start-up to facilitate lab-to-market.

Dr. Garg is also enthusiastic about cool surfaces for mitigating the impact of Urban Heat Islands, as evident in his work supporting the development of a cool roof policy for the State of Telangana in India. He is the recipient of the inaugural Dr Arthur Rosenfeld Urban Cooling Achievement Award – an award established by the Global Cool Cities Alliance to honour the legacy of Dr Rosenfeld’s advocacy for cooler buildings, cooler cities and a cooler planet.

He serves on the editorial board of well-known journals, is a member of several national and international academic committees, was the founding president and board member of the International Building Performance Simulation Association’s (IBPSA) Indian affiliate, is an executive committee member of Alliance for an Energy-Efficient Economy and is a panellist for a chapter on sustainability in the National Building Code of India. He is a Fellow of IBPSA-world, the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC) and the Indian Society of Lighting Engineers.

He is a coauthor of “Building Energy Simulation: A Workbook Using Design Builder”. Garg also has a US patent for his research on Transactive-Energy-based Task Controls which he plans to productise.

Dr Garg has a PhD from the Center for Energy Studies at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and a Bachelor of Engineering from Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur. He is presently based in Punjab, India.