Background and activities

Professor Barbara Szybinska Matusiak has seven years architectural practice. During this period she won several closed architectural competitions in Norway. She joined the Faculty of Architecture at NTNU in 1994 as a research fellow. Her doctoral project, supervised by Professor Øyvind Aschehoug, was devoted to daylighting in linear atrium buildings at high latitudes (finished 1998).

Since then she has been involved in many Norwegian and international scientific projects dealing with daylighting and artificial lighting in architecture, e.g. project manager of the “Visual environment in apartment buildings”, partner in the Translucent Façade project and a partner/member of SYN-TES, the Nordic network. Nowadays she leads two RCN projects: “DayLighting” and “HOME”.

She is also strongly involved in the activities of the international organizations: CIE, AIC and IEA and is the Norwegian representative in the CEN group working with the proposal of a new European standard for daylighting in buildings.

She designed the artificial sky and artificial sun for the Daylight laboratory (constructed 2000-2002) and the newest version of the full-scale room laboratory ROMLAB (finished 2006).

Her teaching activities (master courses) are devoted to daylight, artificial light and colour in architecture. She is the supervisor for three PhD-candidates and one post.doc. at the Faculty of architecture and design and is organizing the international PhD-course: Nordic light and colours. She has been opponent for many PhD-projects and reviewer for a number of international scientific journals and conferences.

She established Light & Colour Group at the Faculty of Architecture at NTNU in 2011 and had led the group since then. Since the group has produced research at high scientific level, is very active in research dissemination and has developed large national and international network, it got the centre status: Light & Colour Centre, NTNU.

She is the member of the Norwegian Academy of Technological Sciences.