Exposome · Built Environment
Built Environment
Two people can occupy the same room and inhabit entirely different environments. This work pairs software that translates sensory genotype into buildable spatial parameters with graduate research treating architecture as a modifiable exposome.
Genetic Sensory Architecture Software
Inputs
Sensory profile, chronotype, genotype markers, and measured room data.
Parameters
Spectral light curves, reverberation targets, thermal bands, tactile palette.
Handoff
Specification sheets an architect or contractor can build directly from.
Origins
The Foundation of Sensory Architecture
The framework began with a building, not a theory. After structural changes were made to the building I lived in, my health deteriorated — sleep, heart rate variability, and cognitive stamina all moved in the wrong direction. My neighbour, in the adjacent apartment, in the same structure, exposed to the same changes, felt nothing at all.
The difference was not the building. It was the body reading it. Bodies are configured differently at the level of how they detect and encode the physical world. That realisation became the software: an analysis of sensory-related genes that explains why an environment is neutral for one person and corrosive for another — and what to change about the space as a result.
Configuration, explained
What caffeine metabolism teaches us about fixed configuration
The CYP1A2 gene determines how quickly caffeine is cleared. An AA genotype clears it fast; AC is intermediate; CC is slow, so the same espresso lingers far longer and hits sleep and blood pressure differently. Nothing about that setting can be negotiated — it is the configuration you were issued.
What can be negotiated is everything around it: steeping time, bean and blend choice, dose, the hour of the last cup. The genotype sets the terrain; behaviour and environment decide how you travel it. Sensory architecture applies exactly this logic to buildings — the configuration is fixed, the space is the variable we get to design.
The core categories
Two foundational sensory systems the software analyses
Neural processing
How the nervous system encodes environmental stimuli — light, sound, rhythm, timing. The CRY2 gene, for example, helps regulate circadian rhythm, sleep-wake cycles, metabolism, and hormone production, which makes the spectral and temporal profile of a room's lighting a physiological input rather than a decorative one.
Mechanosensory
How cells detect mechanical force, vibration, temperature, and pressure. PIEZO1 and the TRPV channels translate physical forces — structural vibration, barometric shifts, thermal gradients — into chemical and electrical signals the body must then process, whether or not it is consciously noticed.
From configuration to design
Epigenetics is where the built environment gets its leverage
DNA is fixed; epigenetics is not. Gene expression responds dynamically to environmental inputs — light exposure and its timing, the acoustics and geometry of physical space, chronic stress, air quality, and nutrition. A space is therefore not a backdrop to health; it is a continuous input into it.
Curating intentional spaces reduces allostatic load — the cumulative cost of adaptation. And because it is a claim about one body, it can be tested as n=1: tracking HRV, sleep quality, recovery, task performance, cortisol, inflammatory markers, and qualitative self-reports before and after a spatial change, to see whether the environment is actually paying the body back.
Graduate Research Program
Master in Neuroarchitecture at SHIFTA, 2026 – 2027
I'm looking to build on my n=1 research but with a focus on the built environment and how people uniquely respond to environments and the role it can prospectively play on human performance.
Master in Neuroarchitecture at SHIFTAProgram
Master in Neuroarchitecture at SHIFTA, 2026 – 2027. A practice-based program examining architecture through the lens of neuroscience, physiology, and human behavior.
Thesis direction
The built environment as a modifiable exposome. Investigating how sensory ergonomics, informed by individual genetics, can influence epigenetic expression and support healthy aging and longevity.
Methods
Within-subject repeated designs, continuous physiology, spatial telemetry, and genotype-informed environmental profiling.
Core philosophy
Space is not a neutral container. It is a continuous signal.
Light, acoustics, air, thermal range, and material tactility are not merely comfort variables — they are inputs the body reads and responds to across epigenetic, metabolic, and neurological pathways. My research treats the built environment as a modifiable exposome: a set of exposures we can intentionally shape to support, rather than erode, human performance over a lifetime.
By pairing sensory genotype with spatial phenotype, the work asks how architecture can move from universal standards to n=1 ergonomics — environments calibrated to the physiological terrain of the person inhabiting them.
Research scope
Genetics-informed sensory ergonomics for longevity
The thesis explores how neuroarchitectural interventions can be targeted to individual sensory and metabolic profiles, with a particular interest in healthy aging and longevity. Rather than asking what space is comfortable on average, it asks what space is performance-supportive for a specific body — today, and across decades.
This bridges environmental design with preventive physiology: using spatial data as one layer of a multi-omic posture, where the goal is to slow adverse drift and extend the window of resilient function.
Collaborators welcome
If you are working at the edge of space and physiology, I would love to hear from you.
I am especially interested in conversations with human performance researchers, neuroscientists, software and hardware developers, and architectural firms exploring evidence-based, health-centered design. Whether you have a dataset, a method, a site, or simply a shared curiosity, this research is open to collaboration.
Get in touch