The month of May has been dedicated to Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month (APAHM), allowing us to bring to light and celebrate those wave-makers who currently are or have made a positive impact to the future. Recently Lamp Rynearson was able to speak with Dr. Lily Wang. She is the Charles W. and Margre H. Durham Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Technology, and Director of the Durham School of Architectural Engineering and Construction in the College of Engineering at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. Her studies on well-being in the built environment is making huge ripples across the working world and is changing what we know about how we work, live, and thrive.
Dr. Wang’s studies linking acoustic conditions to human performance – focusing on environments such as schools, workplaces, and home life are what we will be speaking on today. However, it would be remiss of us to ignore her other successes. She has received numerous honors and awards, from a feature in the SWE Magazine “Women Engineers You Should Know” in 2023, to the ASHA Editor’s Award in 2020. Dr. Wang served the Acoustical Society of America as Chair of its Technical Committee on Architectural Acoustics, Vice President (2015-16), and President (2018-2019). She is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), and active with both ASHRAE and the Institute of Noise Engineering (INCE), through which she is Board Certified. We are honored to have the opportunity to speak with her!
Q: Where do you feel you’ve had the greatest impact in your career? What is the legacy you hope to leave?
L: I have a bit of a roundabout answer for this! I always wanted to be a singer. I started singing when I was four, but it became very apparent after many failed auditions for solos and musicals that I didn’t quite have the voice that was going to make people pay money to hear me. Then one day I was looking at my Physics textbook. The textbook had all these little boxes of what careers you could follow – and one of them said “Acoustical Engineer”. I felt like that was the “Bing!” moment. It would combine my love of music and my knack of math and science. I decided at the age of fifteen that I was going to be an acoustical engineer!
My end goal was always to design concert halls – I wanted to stand in the theater while they were being tuned and pretend that I am that famous singer! However, that was very much the dreams of a fifteen- to-twenty-five-year-old. Now, I’m in my fifties, and this question about the greatest impact is interesting. For all the many dreams I had, I never, EVER, wanted to be a professor. It was always that I wanted to design concert halls. I was trying to get to a firm where I could design concert halls, and on the way there, the academic path was offering opportunities such as: “Oh, you should get your PhD, we’ll pay for it!”, “Oh, you should apply for this post-doc in Denmark, here’s a fellowship for that!” Opportunities I couldn’t just turn down! “Okay, I’ll get a PhD, even though the concert hall designers say you don’t need one. Okay, I’ll go to Denmark – how fun it would be to travel!”
While in Denmark, I was racking up a ton of credit card debt. Thankfully, the University of Nebraska – Lincoln called then and said they were starting up an architectural engineering program and asked me to come teach architectural acoustics. At that point I saw it as – “Oh, this is an opportunity to pay back my debt!” I decided I would give it five years. If I didn’t get tenure, then I would go and design concert halls. Well, now I’ve been a professor for twenty-four years, and it has been such a fulfilling career!
Simply put, I would have answered this question of “greatest impact” very differently when I was younger. For the first fifteen years of my academic career, I taught architectural acoustics to every single student who graduated from the UNL architectural engineering program! Not many of those people have gone into acoustics for their careers, but many of them have gone into the built environment with a greater understanding that acoustics are an important part of their design – that makes me very proud.
Another area I feel I’ve most made an impact in are the students I’ve mentored in architectural acoustics. When I first started, there was a technical meeting on acoustical engineering I attended. There were two women, out of a total of fifty or sixty total! Since then, I’ve had the chance to mentor a lot of underrepresented people in my field specifically. Now when you go to that same technical meeting, it’s much more diverse group. Maybe some of those people in this committee meeting might have been inspired by myself and others like me in the field.
Q: Who, in your life, has been your change-maker?
L: Early on, it was my mother. I am the product of “Tiger Parents” – a term that has been bandied around particularly Asian American families. My mom pushed me from a very young age to be the best that I possibly could be. Unfortunately, she passed away when I was eleven, but I think her imprint on me has been everlasting. That urge to want to excel, to do the best I possibly could, it comes from her.
Beyond that, I’ve had a huge number of mentors. I’m a huge advocate for finding multiple mentors. Many of them were male colleagues that never made me feel like I couldn’t do what I wanted to do. The truth is all my professors were males when I was a young student. Even at the University of Nebraska today, no department chair in the college of engineering had been female until just about four years ago. It seems like we’ve come so far, but there’s still a long way to go!
You didn’t really ask about mentors, though, you said changemakers. I am interpreting that as who helped to change my life. I had many coaches and sponsors to help guide me in my career. One whom I’ll highlight is Carl Rosenberg. He’s retired now, but he was a leader and acoustical consultant with Acentech in Boston. He was my first teacher in acoustics during my undergraduate program. Early on, he helped foster and introduce me to others in the acoustical industry. He encouraged me to attend conferences, he introduced me to people, and I’m very grateful to him.
Q: Your breadth of research and professional experience focuses upon well-being in the built environment. Can you explain well-being in the context of the built environment?
L: There’s a research paper that I was very pleased to be a part of: Ten Questions Concerning Well-Being in the Bulit Environment. It was published in a journal called “Building and Environment”. I’m so grateful to the first author, Sergio Altomonte, for inviting me on to the project. I had not really understood how broadly one could consider “well-being”, until I started working with that group of authors from all sorts of disciplinary fields.
What I think is great about how we tried to expand that definition is we’re not settling for the environment to simply be acceptable. I like the idea that I have helped spread this idea that the built environment could proactively be doing good for the building occupants. In more recent years, that movement is growing. Not a simple “don’t deafen people!” But what we can do to make people feel better?
“There will always be time and budget constraints, but still having such constraints, I urge all of us to want to learn more.”
Dr. Lily Wang, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, Charles W. and Margre H. Durham Distinguished Professor of Engineering and Technology.
Q: What motivated you to focus your research and professional experience on well-being in the built environment?
L: I’m very grateful to have been in that first group of faculties hired to start the architectural engineering program at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln. In architectural engineering across the world, we talk about the structural parts of the building, he mechanical, the electrical – but acoustics has been kind of invisible. How do you see what the acoustics are? You can’t! I felt like my love of sound intersecting with my new role of representing acoustics in architectural engineering made me realize that this was an area in which I could impact people to understand role of acoustics on being well in the built environment.
From the beginning and for those first years, I maintained the dream of designing concert halls. But after several years as a professor, I realized influencing these future building designers can be greatly impactful! We have probably graduated about 700 students from our architectural engineering program now. And of those students – how many are acoustical engineers? Very few! But they all have at least understood and can respect acoustical design, how that’s an important part of indoor environmental quality, no matter what field they chose to follow. That idea is really what’s motivating me nowadays.
Q: As your scholarly article, Ten Questions Concerning Well-Being in the Built Environment notes: “Despite a surge in attention, there are still many questions on how to effectively design, measure, and nurture well-being in the built environment.” Can you discuss any ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations or initiatives aimed at advancing the understanding of well-being in the built environment? Do any involve fields such as psychology, public health, and sociology?
L: I believe that there’s more and more being done. Lately, though, I must admit, I’ve become much more of an administrator, so my finger isn’t currently on the pulse of what other teams around the world are doing. I was very proud to lead a study that was sponsored by the EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency). The study happened between 2013 and 2018, and it was exactly what you are asking: an interdisciplinary collaboration.
Ten years ago, there was less interdisciplinary work that was being done, and certainly nothing like our EPA-sponsored project! Groups like ours have cultivated the interest in studying the built environment in its multiple heterogenous components.
The other area that I am excited about seeing further developed is the economic aspects of well-being in the built environment! What precisely might we gain economically from improving human productivity in the workplace? I’m collaborating with a colleague from Maastricht University in the Netherlands who is spear-heading another Ten Questions paper on this topic for the Building and Environment journal. We think it’ll come out in another year.
One more aspect that I’ve thought about is the idea of more universal or inclusive design of built spaces. My colleagues and I are developing a partnership with others in the Integrated Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at the University of Nebraska Medical Center Munroe-Meyer Institute and with colleagues at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, seeking to understand how we can design built environments, particularly the acoustic conditions to be more inclusively well for everybody!
Q: What do you feel that the AEC industry can do to further advocate well-being in the built environment?
L: From an academic perspective, I am very keen to keep trying to produce evidence-based findings…to prove that specific design choices or guidelines could help the economic world, could help our buildings be better, and our people be happier. I feel like that’s the beauty of being in academia vs. being in the “real world”. I have the time, the capacity, and expectation to be looking at these problems more closely and deeply.
I often like to joke that I’m a failure – I’ve never designed a concert hall, even though that was my original career goal! Part of me understands that in the real world there are timelines and budgets that mean you don’t always get to study the problem very deeply. Where I am now, I can do just that, though.
Your question was about industry, and that’s in the “real world”, where I am not. I think being open to it is the answer. There will always be time and budget constraints, but still having such constraints, I urge all of us to want to learn more…to care about this topic and want to include it into any kind of architectural engineering work. I’m hoping architects will become ambassadors for well-being in the built environment. I also hope they keep sharing questions, ideas, and experiences to us in academia and other research institutions so we can continue to partner and do the research.
To Learn More about Dr. Lily Wang’s work in well-being within the built environment, please visit https://www.growkudos.com/profile/lily_wang as well as https://acoustic.link/LilyWang-KudosProjects