Demi Fang (pron. DEE-mee FAHNG) is an incoming Assistant Professor (active July 2025) with an affiliate appointment in Civil & Environmental Engineering. Her research addresses the intersections of climate, structural design, data-driven decision-making, and craftsmanship. Trained as a structural engineer, her research targets improving the climate impacts of structural systems and the built environment through data-driven design methods. She is also interested in the relationship between craft and reuse, with a focus on Japanese carpentry.
As an educator, Demi is passionate about building intuition of structural principles in the future generation of designers, as well as equipping designers with key computational workflows to not only streamline design processes but also to enable creativity and emissions reductions at early stages of design.
Since 2022, Demi has also been an active contributor as a subcommittee member of SE 2050, a commitment program under the Structural Engineering Institute urging the structural engineering profession to reach net zero embodied emissions by 2050. She has contributed to a variety of SE 2050 resources and guides and led the first round of analysis and reporting of the SE 2050 database. Having worked at firms such as Thornton Tomasetti, SOM, Silman, and Guy Nordenson and Associates, Demi also values engaging directly with practitioners to enhance research impact while contributing directly and meaningfully to the profession.
Demi completed her PhD in Building Technology at MIT Architecture. She also holds master’s degrees in Building Technology and Computational Science & Engineering from MIT, as well as a bachelor’s of science in Civil & Environmental Engineering from Princeton University. She was awarded the MIT Presidential Graduate Fellowship as well as a 2022 Summer Fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) to research sustainability in historic and modern Japanese structural design. She is also trained in evidence-based teaching methods through the MIT Kaufmann Teaching Certificate Program.
Research/Publications Highlights
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=Gjcm-WQAAAAJ
Fang, Demi, Nathan Brown, Catherine De Wolf, and Caitlin Mueller. “Reducing Embodied Carbon in Structural Systems: A Review of Early-Stage Design Strategies.” Journal of Building Engineering 76 (October 1, 2023): 107054. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jobe.2023.107054.
Fang, Demi, Peter Wang, Sophia V. Kuhn, Michael A. Kraus, and Caitlin Mueller. 2024. “Trans-Typology Design Space Exploration: Using Gradients to Inform Decision-Making in the Design of Spanning Structures.” In Proceedings of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) Symposium. Zurich, Switzerland.
Fang, Demi, Sophia V. Kuhn, Walter Kaufmann, Michael A. Kraus, and Caitlin Mueller. 2023. “Quantifying the influence of continuous and discrete design decisions using sensitivities.” In Advances in Architectural Geometry 2023. Stuttgart, Germany. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111162683-031.
Fang, Demi, Juliana Berglund-Brown, Dylan Iwakuni, and Caitlin Mueller. 2023. “Carbon and craft: Learning from the deconstruction, relocation, and reuse of a traditional Japanese house’s timber structure.” In Journal of Physics: Conference Series. Lausanne, Switzerland.
Departments
Architecture
Education
- PhD in Building Technology, MIT Department of Architecture
- SM in Computational Science and Engineering, MIT Schwarzman College of Computing
- SM in Building Technology, MIT Department of Architecture
- BSE in Civil & Environmental Engineering (Structures Track), Princeton University