Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. Products originating from the group – such as DIVA, Mapdwell, DAYSIM and umi – are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.

Before joining MIT in 2012, Christoph led the sustainable design concentration area at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design where the student forum voted him the “2009 Teacher of the Year” out of 77 instructors in the Department of Architecture. From 1997 to 2008 Christoph had worked as a staff scientist at the National Research Council of Canada and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany. He currently serves on the editorial board of several journals including the IBPSA Journal of Building Performance Simulation. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed scientific articles including a text book on daylighting and four book chapters and his work has been supported by a variety of organizations from the National Science Foundation and the Governments of Canada, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to Autodesk, United Technology Corporation, Sage Electrochromics and Transsolar Climate Engineering.

Christoph’s work has been recognized with various awards among them the ARUP Best Paper Prize at Building Simulation 2009 and the 2010 Leon Gaster Price from the Society of Light and Lighting. In 2013 Buildings4Change magazine voted him one of its inaugural Stars of Building in Science. SDL’s spinoff Mapdwell has been recognized with FastCompany’s Design by Innovation 2015 award for Data Visualization as well as a Sustainia 100 award. He is a physicist by training and holds a doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Karlsruhe.