Dr Lesley McIntyre

Lesley joined the School of the Built Environment in August 2016 as a Senior Lecturer in Architecture. Her main teaching responsibilities include design studio across the undergraduate years and module tutor for Design and Communications module. She also contributes to the Technology and Environmental Applications module and supports students at a Masters and PhD Level.

Prior to joining Northumbria, Lesley was a Research Fellow at the University of Dundee and was Co-Investigator and Architectural lead on the RCUK funded BESiDE Research Project (EP/K037293/1 - BESiDE: The Built Environment for Social Inclusion through the Digital Economy). Working within a multidisciplinary team (spanning Architecture, Computing, Medicine and Design), this project investigated the impact of the built environment of care homes on older peoples’ wellbeing, mobility and social connectivity.

Throughout Lesley’s practice and research portfolio she has been motivated to develop a greater understanding of the interactions between people and their built environments. Her PhD, (awarded in 2012) explored the way-finding experiences of people with a range of visual impairment in public buildings.  She has focused on areas such as wellbeing, universal design and accessibility, human building-interaction, physical mobility, way-finding, ageing and ubiquitous technologies. Her research is driven by working with the range of stakeholders (ranging from the residents and staff of care homes, to architects and policy makers) and in refining research methods through working with building users.

Lesley is biographer of Selwyn Goldsmith and was awarded a Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Research Trust Award to write the monograph, ‘Selwyn Goldsmith (1932-2011) and the Architectural Model of Disability: A Retrospective of the Man and the Model’. She currently holds his archive and is the author of the entry of Selwyn Goldsmith in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Lesley has also held a Martin Jones Scholarship (from the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland) and a RIBA Research Trust Award (from the Royal Institute of British Architects).

Lesley has undertaken invitations to speak at an international level at Rochester Institute of Technologies and at the University at Buffalo (NYC). She has been awarded ‘Best Papers’ from the Building Research Establishment (BRE) at Eco-build (the world’s biggest sustainable construction show) and from Sheffield Hallam’s Design 4 Health Conference. She has also contributed research to computing conferences including CHI and ASSETS (premier Human-Computer Interaction conferences). Working as part of a multidisciplinary team, her work has been exhibited as part of the 2008 Shanghai Biennale and won a Gold Award.