The Occasion
The first event of the New Zealand Academy of Applied Research met at the Shangri-La Hotel, Putrajaya, on 26 June 2016. Five conferences ran together: Architecture, Landscape and Built Environment (ICALBE 2016); Civil Engineering, Advanced Structures and Construction Management (ICCEASCM 2016); Environmental Engineering and Renewable Energy (ICEERE 2016); Geography, Climate and Sustainability (ICGCS 2016); and Urban Design and Cities Planning (ICUDCP 2016). The event was officially opened by the President of the Malaysia Green Building Confederation, a sign of the standing the new series sought with industry and professional bodies from the outset.
Founder and Founding Chair
Professor Ghaffarian co-founded the Academy with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini and Farnaz Sheikh, and chaired this founding event. Founding a conference series is an act of institution building rather than event management. It requires a publishing entity, a registered serial, a peer review process and a scientific identity, all before the first paper is presented. The Academy published its proceedings from Auckland under ISSN 2463-5960 in print and 2463-5979 online, so the series entered the scholarly record as a continuing publication from its first day.
Its defining design choice was the multi conference model: several themed conferences on one day, with a single peer reviewed proceedings. Researchers in the built environment often work across boundaries that conferences do not. An architect studying energy performance, an engineer modelling structures and a planner studying urban form may be addressing the same city, yet they usually present at separate meetings to separate audiences. The NZAAR model put them under one roof, with shared sessions and one volume. That choice is the root of GDI’s identity, which deliberately combines green, digital and intelligent agendas that are usually pursued apart.
A Bridge Between Two Academic Homes
The series drew on a career that spanned Malaysia and New Zealand. Prof Ghaffarian completed an MSc in 2008 and a PhD in 2012 at Universiti Putra Malaysia, serving there as a researcher and lecturer from 2006 to 2011, and was Academic Principal Senior Lecturer and R&D Coordinator at Limkokwing University of Creative Technology from 2011 to 2014 before joining AUT in 2014. In the same year he co-founded the RG UBE Lab with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini, a research consortium based in New Zealand, Canada and Malaysia. NZAAR gave that network a regular meeting place, published from New Zealand and convened in Malaysia.
Much of the research that established Prof Ghaffarian’s international standing was rooted in the tropical city. The studies co-authored by the two professors include the thermal performance of unshaded courtyards in hot and humid climates, cited 400 times, and urban heat island mitigation in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong, cited 577 times. At the founding event itself, a paper by the two professors with colleagues examined the thermal performance of outdoor spaces in the tropical context of Kuala Lumpur, a line of inquiry later published as an analysis of outdoor thermal comfort on a Kuala Lumpur university campus in Science of the Total Environment.
Themes Drawn From a Research Agenda
The five founding conferences were not an arbitrary list. Each corresponded to a field in which the founders were active. Urban design and city planning matched the urban heat island and outdoor comfort research; the architecture and built environment conference matched the work on courtyards, vernacular houses and green roofs, the last of which has since been cited 1,304 times; environmental engineering and renewable energy matched reviews on rainwater harvesting and wastewater treatment in green built environments; and civil engineering and construction management matched the construction research Prof Ghaffarian was building at AUT with colleagues there.
Designing a series around a research agenda, rather than around a market for conference places, gave NZAAR its scientific identity from the first day. It also meant that the founders could judge papers across all five conferences with genuine expertise, a condition on which the series’ later indexing depended. The President of the Malaysia Green Building Confederation opening the event confirmed that this agenda spoke to industry as well as to academia, an alignment of research and practice that Prof Ghaffarian has pursued since, from the Green Star studies of the following years to the Industry Chapter of GDI 2026.
A Legacy in Publication
The founding event published 43 peer reviewed papers across 190 pages, the largest of the four NZAAR volumes, on topics from virtual and physical architectural atmosphere to strategies for making New Zealand’s existing buildings energy efficient in warmer climates and water risk management in Central Asia. The proceedings set the publishing model that the series carried into the Web of Science thirteen months later. Across four events NZAAR went on to publish 118 papers by more than 250 authors in 749 pages.
The founding volume also fixed the editorial conventions the series kept to the end: one proceedings for all conferences, papers grouped by conference, and continuous publication under the same serial. That continuity is what allows the four volumes to be read today, in the GDI Academy archive, as a single record of how the series developed rather than as four unrelated meetings.
The Root of GDI
Putrajaya is where the conference lineage Prof Ghaffarian leads today began. The themes first gathered there were reorganised over the following editions and later became the green, digital and intelligent strands of the GDI series, which he founded with Professor Amirhosein Ghaffarianhoseini at AUT in 2025. GDI’s inaugural edition drew more than 200 full papers and nine keynotes, the 2026 Industry Chapter welcomed more than 300 attendees at its peak, and the third edition is planned for Kuala Lumpur in 2027 with CIOB Malaysia.
The founding event also began a record of conference leadership that now includes ANZAScA 2020, SASBE 2024 and the host department for IGLC32, alongside service on the scientific committees of more than 100 international conferences across 33 countries on six continents. The habits formed in 2016, building a serial before seeking an audience, inviting industry leadership to open the event, and putting disciplines in one room, remain the habits of that larger record. Among the honours of a founding chair is to see a model outgrow its first form, and NZAAR’s growth into GDI is that outcome.