Kevin Houser, PhD, PE (NE), FIES, LC, LEED AP is a Professor in the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at Oregon State University with a joint appointment as Chief Engineer at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). His record includes more than 130 publications about light and lighting. He’s won the CIBSE Leon Gaster and Walsh Weston Awards, Edison Report Lifetime Achievement Award, IES Taylor Technical Talent Award three times, the IES Presidential Award, and is a Fellow of IES. He is one of the four editors of the 10th edition IES Lighting Handbook and he was Editor-in-Chief of LEUKOS between 2011 and 2022. His work focuses on human perceptual and biological responses to light and applications of light within the built environment.
His teaching has included graduate courses on research methods, color science, and light sources, and undergraduate courses in lighting design and daylighting. He is the recipient of five teaching awards. While at Penn State, he conceptualized, proposed, and led Project CANDLE, an industry/university collaboration supported by the IALD Education Trust to advance lighting education. He has provided curriculum leadership in roles as Architectural Engineering Graduate Program Officer (Penn State) and Chair of the Architectural Engineering Curriculum Committee (Nebraska). In 2019 he relocated to Oregon State University to help develop a new degree program in Architectural Engineering, while maintaining his focus on lighting. While at Oregon State, with support from the Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education, he developed a three-course lighting sequence ARE 361 Fundamentals for Lighting Design, ARE 461 Lighting Design for the Built Environment I, and ARE 462 Lighting Design for the Built Environment II.
His research focuses on applied uses of light, including fundamental inquiries into human perceptual and biological responses, and the application of this knowledge to the spectral design of light sources. In collaboration with students and with support from industry, government, and professional societies, he has created light sources with novel spectra, informed by models from vision science, resulting in improved color perceptions, whiteness perception, and increased brightness-perception-per-watt in comparison to conventional light sources. He has applied spectral tuning concepts to human photobiological health, demonstrating improvements in the cognition and mood states of frail elders. His collaborators include more than 20 companies in the lighting industry, including General Electric, Lumileds, Philips, Soraa, and Steris, and government agencies that include the California Energy Commission, US Department of Energy, US Department of Defense, and the US Federal Trade Commission. Interests also include research methods and the effective communication, dissemination, and critical consumption of research results.
In all that he does in his life as a scholar, Prof. Houser is committed to a rigorous search for knowledge, appreciation for the unknown, and broad societal impact. His outcome-oriented approach is supported by technical and methodological expertise, effective communication, and investment in dissemination and outreach.