International first prize for young scientist

ECONOMY / IZMIR

Yaşar University Architecture Program PhD student Nurefşan Sönmez won the world championship in the CIE Young Lighting Scientist Contest 2025 held in Russia with the artificial intelligence-supported model he developed for daylight optimization in historical buildings.

Nurefşan Sönmez, a student in the Architecture Doctorate Program at Yaşar University's Graduate School of Architecture, developed an integrated optimization model for daylight improvements in historic buildings. Significantly shortening the model's implementation time thanks to artificial intelligence, Sönmez expanded the model as part of an international scholarship to include the effects of daylighting strategies on thermal comfort and energy consumption. The model was tested on both an early-20th-century rowhouse in Ayvalık, Balıkesir, and a late-19th-century rowhouse in Antwerp, Belgium, and compared against different climatic conditions and building codes.

This comprehensive study, supported by TÜBİTAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey), was prepared by Nurefşan Sönmez in collaboration with her advisors Assoc. Prof. Dr. Arzu Cılasun Kunduracı, Prof. Dr. Yonca Erkan, and Dr. Cemre Uğurlu. The project, submitted to the Young Lighting Scientist Contest 2025 organized by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE), was awarded first place. The paper, selected from among numerous scientific papers submitted from Turkey, China, Russia, and Japan, will be published in the prestigious journal Light & Engineering, a lighting journal.