Mina Ishac

I have been actively involved in applied research at the German University in Cairo. As a research assistant, I worked on 2 research projects with Hochschule für Technik HFT, Stuttgart. I contributed to writing a research proposal that funded the project with GAIIA award "The German African Innovation Incentives Award" in Berlin 2017. I worked on the architectural design and construction supervision of a demonstrator building lab at GUC campus which presented a state of the art technology that was built in Egypt, in addition to manufacturing supervision of PVT water pipe collectors, surveying thermal water pipes in Egyptian local market, bringing specialized companies from industry in thermal activation systems. In Stuttgart, I participated in a building simulation and dissemination workshop with HFT Team working on TRANSYS and conducting experimental measurement setups on solar collectors.

I contributed to the building performance simulation in research work authoring 4 research papers. I published my master's work in the Journal of Building Performance Simulation aiming to devise a novel methodology to standardize the optimization process of shading devices. Afterwords, I worked on devising light shelf performance curves' map which can predict how daylighting and shading would behave, with the addition of light shelves, in classrooms in any geographical location in the northern hemisphere by regression and scripting in Matlab, the work which was published in ASCAAD conference in 2021. After that, I worked on investigating new building envelopes consisting of facade modules mimicking and inspired from the skin's microornamentation of lizards in Egypt, the work which I published at PowerSkin conference in TUMunich 2022. I authored a book that documented the work of 14 masters students in an elective course that I taught. The book presents the simulation outcome of 8 case studies of school buildings in Cairo, and was named: 'School Cairo: Building Performance Evaluation Daylight Energy Comfort'.