Jan Carmeliet is an architectural engineer holding a PhD in Civil Engineering / Building Physics in 1992 from KU Leuven in Belgium. He was assistant, associate and full Professor Building Physics at KU Leuven from 1998 until 2008 and part-time Professor at TU Eindhoven from 2001 until 2008.

Since June 2008, Jan Carmeliet is full professor at the Chair of Building Physics at the department of Mechanical Engineering and Process Engineering at ETH Zürich in Switzerland. He was head of Laboratory of Multi-scale Studies in Building Physics at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland from 2008 to 2017.

His research interests concern urban climate and urban heat island mitigation, multiscale behaviour of porous materials and their fluid interactions, and building energy demand at building and urban scale.

His research resulted in more than 400 scientific journal papers. His h-index is 92 on Google Scholar. He has graduated more than 40 PhD students.

He was research councillor of the National Science Foundation Switzerland from 2017 to 2020 and expert of the Swiss Innovation Agency (InnoSuisse) from 2013 to 2020. He was director of the graduate program ‘master integrated building systems’ at ETHZ from 2014 to 2018. He was member of the research commission of ETH Zürich from 2012 to 2016, the scientific commission of the CCEM (Centre of Competence Energy and Mobility) from 2012 to 2016 and the Board of Energy Science Centre ETH Zürich from 2010 to 2017.