Founders and Chairs of GDI

Professor Ali GhaffarianHoseini leads the School of Future Environments at Auckland University of Technology, the home of architecture and built environment engineering at AUT. He took up the headship in January 2026 after six years as Head of Built Environment Engineering, and brings more than two decades of academic leadership across architecture, construction, creative technologies and engineering. Under his leadership this young School has moved from unranked to the global top 260 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

His standing extends well beyond the university. He sits on the Artificial Intelligence Reference Group at the Office of the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor, serves as an Evaluator for the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and as a Delegate of the College of Assessors at Royal Society Te Apārangi, and is the sole academic member of the BIMinNZ advisory committee. Internationally he has assessed proposals for the United Nations, the European Research Council, Horizon Europe and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.

His scholarship joins advanced digital technologies to sustainable development, from building information modelling, digital twins and artificial intelligence in design and construction to smart cities, regenerative design, climate adaptation and urban heat mitigation. It comprises more than 300 international outputs with more than 11,000 Google Scholar citations, and he has served as organiser or committee member of more than 100 international conferences in over 30 countries, including the four NZAAR event series that preceded GDI.

Professor Amirhosein GhaffarianHoseini is Professor of Architecture and Urban Transformation and Associate Head of School (Research) in the School of Future Environments at Auckland University of Technology. He is New Zealand’s most cited architecture professor and has been listed among the top two per cent of the world’s most cited scientists by Stanford University every year from 2020 to 2026. From 2020 to 2026 he was the School’s Director of Postgraduate and Doctoral Studies, and he chaired the Faculty Postgraduate Board of Studies.

His research addresses the future of buildings and cities: environmental performance, urban microclimate, healthy and regenerative design, neuroarchitecture and digital twin enabled decision making. His more than 300 research outputs, among them over 200 articles in the leading journals of the field, have drawn more than 11,500 citations, with an h-index of 45. Two of his papers are the most read and second most read in the 60-year history of Architectural Science Review.

He leads the field’s publishing as editor-in-chief of Urbanization, Sustainability and Society, associate editor of Smart and Sustainable Built Environment and Intelligent Buildings International, and editor of the Springer Nature book collection From Neuro-Architecture to Neuro-Cities. He advises Auckland through the Auckland Urban Design Panel, co-leads the APRU Future Energy Landscapes cluster and is International Communications Lead of the CIBSE Intelligent Buildings Group. Before GDI he chaired IGLC 2024, SASBE 2024 and ASA 2020 in Auckland, and he chaired the technical committee of DFBI 2025 in Delft.