The Delegation
The Viet Nam Government Timber Construction Study Tour to New Zealand ran from 22 to 27 March 2026. Its delegates included Mr Le Van Ke, Deputy Director General of the Department of Science, Technology, Environment and Building Materials at the Ministry of Construction, and Dr Luu Thi Hong, Vice President of the Viet Nam Institute for Building Materials, with senior colleagues from both organisations. AUT was the first academic stop on the programme, on Monday 23 March, at the Tukutuku building. The delegation then went on to the University of Auckland, Rotorua’s forestry and timber manufacturing sector, Tauranga, BRANZ and industry bodies in Wellington. The itinerary amounted to a survey of the whole New Zealand timber system, from research and testing to manufacture and regulation, and AUT opened it.
The School’s Programme
Under Professor Ghaffarian’s leadership as Head of School, the School of Future Environments presented its research on timber construction and its environmental performance. Dr Pouyan Zarnani spoke on green timber construction and resilient seismic protection, under the principle that a sustainable building must also be resilient enough to withstand an earthquake. Dr Alice Bui presented on the life cycle environmental performance of timber buildings, and Dr Dat Doan on scaling sustainable timber construction in New Zealand. Dr Priscila Besen also presented. The presentations drew on the School’s research in structural engineering, life cycle assessment and construction management, and on New Zealand examples from cross laminated timber and laminated veneer lumber to seismic protection systems in public and health buildings. Taken together, the programme answered the question a ministry asks of any material: whether it is safe, whether it is sustainable across its life, and whether it can be delivered at scale.
Professor Ghaffarian as Host
Receiving a ministerial delegation is an act of institutional representation, and it reflects the direction Prof Ghaffarian has set for the School. As Head of the School of Future Environments, Prof Ghaffarian has extended its engagement beyond academic conferences to government, diplomatic, cultural and iwi partners, and a visit from the Ministry of Construction of Viet Nam belongs squarely to that agenda. Hosting it in the first quarter of the new headship signalled that the School intends to be a counterpart for governments, not only for universities, when they look abroad for evidence on how to build.
Prof Ghaffarian brought to the occasion long familiarity with the construction and urban challenges of Southeast Asia. Prof Ghaffarian studied and taught at Universiti Putra Malaysia from 2006 to 2011 and later led research and development for a faculty of architecture and built environment in Malaysia until 2014. A review he coauthored on urban heat island mitigation strategies in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong, cited 577 times, addresses exactly the pressures of rapid tropical urbanisation that Viet Nam now faces, and since 2015 Prof Ghaffarian has contributed to the QS and Times Higher Education ranking assessments of universities in Southeast Asia, among other regions.
A Research Base Built over a Decade
The presentations rested on capability Prof Ghaffarian has helped build over many years. Dr Dat Doan, who spoke on scaling sustainable timber construction, completed his doctorate under Prof Ghaffarian’s primary supervision in 2019, with a thesis on enhancing Green Star certification by improving BIM uptake through system dynamics modelling; the two have since jointly edited journal special issues on energy efficiency, risk and resilience and on circular economy in the built environment. Their collaboration also produced A critical comparison of green building rating systems, cited 966 times, a comparison of the assessment frameworks by which the environmental performance of buildings, timber among them, is judged.
Timber has also been a recurring subject of the master’s research Prof Ghaffarian supervises, from the construction of tall timber buildings in New Zealand (2019) and the effective implementation of cross laminated timber (2020) to a comparison of timber and concrete systems for mid rise construction (2025). On the seismic side, Prof Ghaffarian led the design, development and operationalisation of AUT’s Structural Testing Laboratory, a nationally significant facility with full scale structural testing systems that supports research programmes and commercial testing with industry, government and research partners. His recent work with colleagues on whole life costing for seismic and climate sensitive residential construction links the two concerns the delegation came to study: resilience and lifetime performance.
Significance for the School and for Aotearoa
Viet Nam is urbanising rapidly, and its government is examining how sustainable materials can reduce the carbon cost of that growth. A ministerial delegation choosing AUT as its first academic visit places the School’s timber and seismic research in front of policymakers who shape standards for a fast growing construction market, and positions New Zealand expertise in sustainable and earthquake resilient timber as something of value to the wider region. Hosting the visit in Tukutuku, a timber building designed with sustainability and place at its centre, let the building make part of the argument, a theme Prof Ghaffarian has explored in writing on what a university building should do in an age of AI. For the School, the visit opens a relationship with a national ministry and its research institute at a moment when both are setting direction, and it adds a government counterpart in Southeast Asia to an international network that already spans more than 30 countries.
The School has precedent for turning such contacts into lasting collaboration. Prof Ghaffarian led AUT’s research collaboration with the College of Architecture at Qassim University in Saudi Arabia in 2022 and an AUT funded academic partnership with Qatar University in 2023, and his conference, committee and keynote work now spans 33 countries on six continents, eleven of them in the Asia Pacific. A ministerial visit is the beginning of a relationship rather than its outcome. Its value will be measured by the joint research, exchange and policy dialogue that follow, and the School enters that dialogue with a clear offer: evidence on timber that is resilient in earthquakes, sustainable across its life and deliverable at scale, drawn from a country that has had to solve all three problems at once.