Posted 27 January 2014 - 9:18am
A commitment to sustainability and the development of greener cities has resulted in Australia Day honours for Scientia Professor Deo Prasad, CEO of the CRC for Low Carbon Living (CRCLCL).
Born in Fiji and raised in New Zealand before settling in Australia nearly 30 years ago, Professor Prasad has made an outstanding contribution to low carbon research through his work on high performance buildings and the challenge of bringing sustainability research into front-end design and construction. He has been appointed as an Officer of the General Division of the Order of Australia, an honour bestowed on only five per cent of nominees every year.
“It is an absolute pleasure to receive this honour. As someone who was born and raised overseas, it’s wonderful to think that I can make such a valuable contribution to Australia, and that my contribution can be honoured by my adopted homeland in such a meaningful way,” he says.
Professor Prasad undertook a series of distinguished careers as an architect, engineer and scientist before turning seriously to academia in 1985. He has built his reputation on going ‘beyond the baseline’ of low carbon research, moving into new frontiers that challenge contemporary beliefs about the role of the built environment in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2012, Professor Prasad was the driving force behind a bid for the development of the CRCLCL, which has a focus on developing a globally competitive low carbon built environment sector within Australia. The successful bid was a major achievement that saw him bringing together 50 industry partners to join forces in finding real-world solutions to pressing environmental issues relating to the built environment.
Professor Prasad says that the fragmented nature of the built environment sector made the CRC a particularly challenging prospect.
“Researchers and organisations tend to focus on one element of a larger problem – they’re interested in buildings, or they’re interested in cities, or in precincts,” he says.
“But the reality is that creating buildings and cities is a multidisciplinary process, and so we need to approach it holistically if we’re serious about building better cities. That has been the focus of my research career, and it really underpins what we’re doing at the CRC.”
In addition to receiving millions of dollars in competitive research funding, and publishing over 250 journal articles and six books, Professor Prasad is a leader within the international built environment sector. His many honorary roles including being an ambassador for the Business Events Sydney , a former Green Globe Award winner (2004), and the winner of Royal Australian Institute of Architect’s Neville Quarry Architectural Education Prize (2006). Internationally, he is member of numerous boards and committees, including the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada’s Solar Buildings Research Network and the United Nations Environment Program’s Eco-Peace Leadership Centre Board (Seoul) and chairing the Global Civil Society Forum for UNEP (Asia Pacific).
According to the Hon. Robert Hill AC, Chair of the CRCLCL, the extent of Prasad’s contribution to industry, academia and the broader community sets him apart as a researcher
“We are lucky to have him working on such complex multidisciplinary research right here in Australia at the CRC,” Hill says.
“While only in its early stages, the CRCLCL is already showing signs of having the capacity to make a major contribution to international built environment research.”