Stefan Flagner joined HOBEL as a new PostDoc

Stefan shares his experiences, first impressions, and plans as he joins EPFL and the Human-Oriented Built Environment Lab. Let's see what he shares.

You just arrived at the EPFL Fribourg - what are your first impressions?

Fribourg is a very nice city, very hilly and cozy. The campus of EPFL in Fribourg looks much different from the business schools I have worked and studied in before.

Can you tell us more about your career in academia?

Before academia, I worked as a financial consultant in Germany and Luxembourg. My background is in economics and finance, which is why I started my career in the financial sector. Only later, I started my PhD at the Business School at Maastricht University, specifically in the Real Estate Finance team. During my PhD, I was also part of a team of human physiologists at the Medical School in Maastricht, which allowed me to obtain a PhD double degree from the Business School and the Medical Faculty.

My research on indoor air quality is thereby characterized by a strong interdisciplinary approach, in which I aimed to understand the mechanism of the impact of indoor air quality on human health and cognition, and how it translates into financial outcomes and economics value.

What are you most excited about your appointment at the Human-Oriented Built Environment Lab?

Learning from the engineering side of indoor environmental quality and healthy buildings and how to connect this knowledge with the economic side in order to write interdisciplinary studies. I love to learn new things and work myself into new fields. I think interdisciplinary work and the combination of different viewpoints enables impactful research.

What will your research focus on over the coming year?

I will focus on the economic value of indoor environmental quality. Specifically, on how to create a business case for investments into the indoor environment and health buildings. I also want to research the return on investments of healthy buildings for intuitional investors and asset managers, as well as how healthy buildings and an investment into the indoor environment can be used to increase overall welfare for home owners.

What inspires you about the built environment of the future and its research schemes?

The strong relevance for human life. We spend most of our time indoors, thereby the indoor environment has a major, but often underestimated impact on humans, including their health, well-being and performance.

Whenever you are not doing research, what are you interested in?

I find my balance from work in sports, hiking and being outdoors. Also, I would like to use my free time here to bring my French language knowledge to a new level. I lived in France before, but if you don’t use it, you lose it. So, I hope to be able to practice my French. Because I am German, I don’t need to worry about the second language in Fribourg.