3x365days of gratitude
There’s a strange thing about a PhD diary. It writes itself. Every page comes from the same place: maximum ambition, maximum audacity, and maybe a little programmatic disobedience. A refusal to simply follow the expected path, in favour of exploring something new, and understanding where I come from.
On paper, this was a three-year PhD, a case study rooted in Myanmar. But in truth, it took more than a decade of effort to arrive at it.
And when it finally ended, I felt empty. Not the hollow kind of empty, though the kind that’s somehow full at the same time, brimming with gratitude. Slowly, I began to realise: there was so much more still to come.
A PhD can feel like a solo pursuit, abstract, internal, invisible to everyone but yourself. But mine only became something real because of the people around me.
I keep coming back to this idea, the relationship between PhD life, the small communities we build, and the wider world outside them. It fascinates me endlessly, because even the most ordinary days end up layered with memory, gratitude, and quiet awe.
PhD life in UoN’s SRB (Sustainable Research Building) was its own little world, a bubble of time, sealed off from everything that came before it, and everything that would come after. If I hadn’t been part of that group, I know, without a doubt, that I would have experienced this PhD very differently. Some friends showed up with a slice of cake, comfort food, and time freely given. Some showed up when my health broke down, and quite literally helped save me. And some may never even realise the role they played, the small, steady presence that became something to look back on, and something to aspire to.
I want to express my deep gratitude to the people who made this possible. My amazing supervisors, Prof Lucelia Rodrigues and Prof Mark Gillott, guided me through every stage of this work. My internal assessor, Dr Robin Wilson, and my external examiner, Dr Anna Mavrogianni from the Bartlett, UCL, challenged and sharpened my thinking when it mattered most. More importantly, the quiet, unconditional support of family and relatives, holding everything together. Thank you all for giving me this experience.
Like so many milestones during the pandemic, my traditional graduation ceremony was postponed. Instead, on the 4th of August 2021, the University of Nottingham’s Faculty of Engineering put together something unexpectedly beautiful: a graduation yearbook for Graduation Without Borders 2021. Paging through it, watching an entire cohort’s work and stories laid out in one place, sparked an idea, why not record this experience properly, here on my own blog?
There’s a photograph I keep returning to. It shows a Buddhist temple perched on one half of a mountain, while the other half has been stripped away entirely, carved down by heavy machinery mining for jade, in Hpakant, Kachin State, Myanmar (Lat, 2021). The site sits just 150km from Myitkyina, one of the case study cities in my research.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, this one holds many that were never written down: stories of inequality, of climate change, of deforestation carried out in the name of business as usual. Stories of corruption, of a disregard for human life and dignity, and of civil wars with no clear end in sight. It is an image of Myanmar as an unfinished nation, caught at the heart of 21st-century Asia, wedged between India and China, still searching for its shape.
Image courtesy of Hkun Lat (permission obtained from the photographer)
This post is based on my thesis at the University of Nottingham. My goal here is simple: take research that can feel intimidating and make it easy for anyone to understand.
- PhD thesis title: Improving the thermal performance and resilience of Myanmar housing in a changing climate
- Associated Schools / Departments: Department of Architecture and Built Environment (University of Nottingham, UK)
- Supervisor: Rodrigues, Lucelia and Gillott, Mark
- eprints ID: 65163
- Publication Date: August 4, 2021
- UoN Repository URI: https://repository.nottingham.ac.uk/handle/123456789/61805
When I submitted my thesis, I was grappling with how the coup had upended the hopeful premise of my PhD. I added my personal reflections as a postscript.
Here is a plain-language version.
Myanmar’s Homes Weren’t Built for This Much Heat
For generations, Myanmar’s traditional houses did their job well. Raised floors kept living space off the hot ground, vented roofs let heat rise and escape, light walls caught whatever breeze was moving. It was smart, low-cost engineering, tuned over centuries to the local climate.
That climate isn’t what it used to be.
I spent time tracking real-world weather patterns, placing temperature sensors inside homes across the country, and running simulations to see how far the old designs could still stretch. The short answer: not far enough anymore. The longer answer is more interesting, and it points toward a way of building that borrows from both old and new without fully committing to either.
Where the old tricks stop working
The data made it clear pretty quickly that vernacular design is running up against a wall it wasn’t built for. In both the north and centre of the country, the number of hours above 30°C has nearly doubled compared to historical averages — that’s not a marginal shift, it’s a different climate regime. In wetter areas like Myitkyina, heat and humidity are now combining indoors to levels where the human body genuinely struggles to cool itself through sweat. And the airflow strategies that used to be the whole solution start working against you once outdoor air itself is too hot — opening a window just invites more heat in rather than pushing it out.
High roofs and raised floors still help. They’re just no longer sufficient on their own.
Why importing a European solution doesn’t fix this
The instinct, when people think “energy-efficient house,” is often to reach for something like Germany’s Passivhaus standard — seal the building tightly, insulate it heavily, keep outside air from getting in. It works well in a cold climate, where the goal is keeping heat inside.
In Myanmar, that same instinct backfires. Thick insulation in a tropical house doesn’t keep heat out so much as trap it in. It blunts the sharpest afternoon temperature spikes, sure, but it also stops the house from shedding heat overnight, so day after day the indoor temperature creeps upward. You end up with a house that’s hotter overall than one with no insulation at all.
What actually worked in the simulations
The combination that performed best wasn’t a return to purely traditional building, and it wasn’t a scaled-down Passivhaus either. It sat somewhere in between.
Shade turned out to matter more than almost anything else — blocking sunlight before it ever reaches the walls, through deep roof overhangs, window awnings, outdoor screens. That single move did more for indoor comfort than most other interventions combined.
Insulation still has a place, but a modest layer rather than a heavy one. Enough to take the edge off peak daytime heat, without holding onto that heat once the sun goes down.
And roof colour matters more than people tend to assume. A light-coloured, reflective roof bounces sunlight away before it becomes heat in the first place. Once you’ve got that reflective surface doing the work, adding more insulation on top barely moves the needle — the paint’s already handling the hard part.
The constraint that matters as much as the physics
None of this is only a design question. It’s an economic one too. Sealed, airtight construction needs specialised materials and trained labour that simply aren’t accessible or affordable at scale in Myanmar right now. Any fix that assumes otherwise isn’t really a fix; it’s a wish list.
What seems to actually work is keeping what already functions in traditional building and layering in targeted, low-cost upgrades — shade, modest insulation, reflective roofing — rather than importing a standard built for a different climate and a different economy.
Postscript
In 2016, a year after Myanmar’s 2015 elections ended decades of international isolation, I started my thesis proposal on housing, climate change, and resilience. At the time I believed climate change would force the country to stay open to the world, whether its leaders wanted that or not. I built models of future climate scenarios trying to work out how to make homes cooler and safer. Looking back now, I think I underestimated just how volatile Myanmar’s politics really are — trying to predict anything here is chasing a moving target.
By 2021 that brief window had closed. The February 1 coup erased roughly a decade of democratic progress almost overnight. World Bank data had shown real gains in governance between 2010 and 2020, but the country was still fragile underneath that progress, and it didn’t take long for that fragility to show. Within weeks of the takeover, illegal logging was already happening in national parks despite export bans. The World Bank revised its growth forecast down to a predicted 10% contraction — the worst downturn since 1988. By April, the UN was describing a country on the brink: a health system failing, a banking sector near collapse, supply chains broken, violence rising, natural resources slipping into the control of armed groups.
The coup didn’t just slow things down. It reshaped daily life for everyone.
Climate work needs two things happening at once — cutting emissions, and preparing for the impacts that are already locked in. Both require a government where different levels of authority actually coordinate. In Myanmar right now, that kind of coordination is basically absent, which means adaptation work is fighting uphill before it even starts.
Ethnicity sits underneath nearly every conflict in the country. Since independence in 1948, ethnic minority groups have been fighting for basic political, economic, and cultural rights against the dominant Burman majority, and that imbalance has shaped the state for decades. Going back to the pre-coup version of democracy wouldn’t solve this — real progress needs equity across ethnic lines, not just a return to the old status quo.
In a related piece of research, I looked at how housing reflects cultural identity here. Historically, home design was mostly about basic shelter; over time it shifted toward surviving both climate impacts and political upheaval. I mapped eight traditional house designs from different ethnic groups and compared two travel documentaries — Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown (2013) and Simon Reeve’s Burma (2018) — which happened to capture two very different moments in the country’s story, five years apart. What stood out was that even as homes adapt to new physical threats, the underlying cultural logic of how people build home stays remarkably stable.
Anyone doing housing or development research in Myanmar has to work within this reality: an unstable economy, deep ethnic inequality, overlapping conflicts involving both the military and non-state armed groups. Hitting something like Myanmar’s Sustainable Development Plan targets would require rethinking the economy from the ground up, through governance that’s actually inclusive.
A government can write housing policy on paper under any regime, including an authoritarian one. But paper policy isn’t resilience. The mass displacement after Cyclone Nargis in 2008 showed that lasting solutions need real political freedom and economic stability behind them — not just good design on its own.
Building safer homes here isn’t purely a technical problem. It depends on whether Myanmar’s diverse ethnic groups can find their way to equal rights, peace, and justice together. The physics of heat is the easy part.