WHO WE ARE
Shared passion for daylight, complemented by our diverse competencies.
Our Team
The OCULIGHT team is an interdisciplinary group of researchers and practitioners who specialize in the evaluation of daylight to promote human health, emotion, and comfort indoors.
After working together for nearly 6 years in an academic capacity, we made the transition from research to practice in order to share our expertise and methods with design practitioners and building owners.
Together, we bring over 25 years of experience working at the intersection of research and professional practice.
OCULIGHT was founded by a team of specialists in daylighting, building technology, architectural design, and data science.
Marilyne ANDERSEN
Co-Founder and Managing Director
Marilyne Andersen has a background in physics and has been working at the interface between architecture and engineering throughout her academic career. Her research and consulting activities focus on building performance through the use and optimization of daylight. She works on a wide range of subjects, including visual and thermal comfort, tools for early stage design, circadian photoreception and health, and advanced facade technologies for daylight redistribution. Marilyne Andersen has a Master of Science in Physics, a PhD in Building Physics from EPFL, and has been a scholar at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab as well as Assistant then Associate Professor tenure-track at MIT before joining EPFL as faculty member, where she has been Dean of the ENAC School from 2013 to 2018. She is a Full Professor of Sustainable Construction Technologies and the Head of the Laboratory of Integrated Performance in Design (LIPID) at EPFL.
Siobhan ROCKCASTLE
Co-Founder and Design Director
Siobhan’s expertise connects architectural design with building performance simulation and experimental research. Her work explores the impacts of daylight on human emotion, relying on user experiments to derive prediction models for simulation-based methods of analysis. As an environmental design consultant and project manager, Siobhan has worked on numerous projects between the United States and Europe. She has a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell, a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from MIT, and a PhD in Architecture and Science of the City from the EPFL. In addition to her position at OCULIGHT, Siobhan is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Chair of the Baker Lighting Lab, and member of the Institute of Health in the Built Environment at the University of Oregon. Siobhan compliments her years of research with a deep passion for interdisciplinary practice and performance-driven design.
María Lovísa ÁMUNDADÓTTIR
Co-Founder and Technical Director
María has a background in data science and computational engineering, which compliments her passion for interdisciplinary knowledge and communication. Her research integrates recent findings from photobiology into architectural design by proposing new models to quantify the non-image-forming effects of light on health. María has a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Iceland, a Master of Science in Computational Science and Engineering from the ETHZ, and a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the EPFL. Maria’s passion for data and her experience in managing multi-disciplinary projects makes her a unique asset to the OCULIGHT team, bridging information, technology, and practice with an intuitive understanding of biology and design. As a research engineer, she compliments her love of numbers with a passion for the outdoors in her motherland of Iceland.