Cynthia Hou has been engaged in research on facilities management in both the private and public sectors. Her research focuses include post-occupancy evaluation, workplace management, strategic facilities management, and heritage adaptive reuse and revitalisation. Recently, she has leveraged smart technologies in her research by investigating smart hotels, smart heritage facilities management, and virtual reality (VR) technologies applications in built environment education. She seeks to investigate efficient and sustainable built environment management strategies from a facilities management perspective. She is also keen on adopting digitalisation approaches in her research, with an aim to delineating the dynamics among people, facilities and space in the built environment and exploring data-driven solutions for facilities management problems in society.

Cynthia is a member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the programme leader for the Master Programme in Facilities Management, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.