Faculty & Staff News

January

January 14, 2025: Carnegie Mellon University receives an award of $80,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as part of the Research Grants in the Arts program. The award supports a study examining university students' creative practices with artificial intelligence (AI), for the purpose of informing arts-integrative secondary education. The project is spearheaded by the CFA Working Group on Artificial Intelligence, headed by Group Lead and Associate Teaching Professor Daragh Byrne. Research Grants in the Arts supports research studies that investigate the value and/or impact of the arts, either as individual components of the U.S. arts ecosystem or as they interact with each other and/or with other domains of American life.

January 30, 2025: PhD-BPD candidate Guanzhou Ji successfully defends his PhD dissertation, “Capturing, Editing, and Relighting Indoor Scenes from a Single Panorama.” His advisory committee is comprised of Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer (co-chair), Professor Srinivasa Narasimhan (co-chair, School of Computer Science Robotics Institute), Professor Susan Finger (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Sing Bing Kang (Zillow Group).

Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel delivers a talk on her new co-edited book, “Critical Computational Relations in Design, Architecture and the Built Environment,” at The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO For Creative Inquiry.

January 31, 2025: Special Faculty Dr. Yiqun Pan delivers a presentation titled, “Research on Building Decarbonization from Top-down and Bottom-up Perspectives,” at the Distinguished Speaker Seminar, Department of Architectural Engineering, Penn State University.

February

Image

February 3, 2025: PhD-Arch student Ifrah Asif is featured on UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design’s social media (Instagram & LinkedIn) as part of Women of Weitzman, a series that celebrates the contributions of female faculty and recent alums to the built environment and the arts. The feature highlights her work in historic preservation and climate resiliency, and recent graduate internship at the Getty Conservation Institute.

February 5, 2025: Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel and Special Faculty Tommy CheeMou Yang receive 19 submissions for their 4S 2025 panel on “Embodied Knowledge(s), Technological Distancing, and Experience.”

February 6, 2025: Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel participates on the TAD 8:2 Coding Panel with Peggy Deamer, Anna-Maria Meister, Bernard Geoghegan, Adam Marcus and Andrew Kudless, and the Editorial Board Winifred Elysse Newman and Theodora Vardouli in a lively conversation on the critical and generative dimensions of coding for architecture and design.

February 12, 2025: Assistant Professor Nida Rehman receives a promotion to Associate Professor without Indefinite Tenure, and Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria receives a promotion to Associate Teaching Professor, effective July 1, 2025.

February 15, 2025: Professor Doug Cooper’s show, “Forbes Field and Other Remembered Places,” is on view at Pittsburgh’s Concept Art Gallery. The show, featuring Cooper’s signature large-format vignettes of the city’s architectural places and this video about the years he lived across from Forbes Field in Oakland, opens with a reception with Cooper on Saturday, February 15 from 1-4pm and runs through Saturday, March 29, 2025.

February 18, 2025: Remaking Cities Institute Visiting Scholar Carolyn Ristau releases findings from her latest research project on zoning and morals entitled, “Protecting Property Values, Not People: Discriminatory Land Use Policies in Pittsburgh, 1910s – Today,” with co-author Ruchi Patel, PhD. In 2024, Ristau partnered with the UrbanKind Institute to investigate 100 years of land use policy and practice in Pittsburgh and their impacts on inequities past and present. More information on this and related research is available on Ristau’s website Details Reviewed.

February 20, 2025: Don Carter, FAIA, Past President of AIA Pittsburgh and former Director of the Remaking Cities Institute at Carnegie Mellon Architecture, is featured in the fourth episode of AIA Pittsburgh’s “Perspectives.” This interview series explores the personal and professional history of long-standing and accomplished chapter members. Carter discusses his approach to community development and public engagement in design, organizing the 2013 Remaking Cities Conference, and publishing his latest book. 

February 25, 2025: The Rachel Carson EcoVillage, a co-housing community co-founded by Adjunct Faculty Stefani Danes, FAIA, and Professor Doug Cooper is featured in a segment on WTAE Pittsburgh. Co-housing is designed to create spaces for neighbors to interact, including a common house that will feature community meals several times a week. The community will be built on property near La Roche University in McCandless Township.

January

January 12, 2024: Carnegie Mellon Architecture awards $100,000 to 16 project and teaching proposals as part of the 2024 PJ Dick Innovation Fund Faculty Grants Program. Established in 2023 by PJ Dick Trumbull Lindy Group, the program will award a total of $400,000 over four years to support faculty research and teaching innovations that address the school’s three pedagogical challenges of climate change, social justice and artificial intelligence.

January 23, 2024: Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli (McGill), authors and editors of “Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design,” launch the book at the Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture, McGill University in Montréal. The event includes a conversation with Sofian Audry (Hexagram), Molly Wright Steenson (American Swedish Institute) and Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture); a book display; and an informal reading with Canadian book contributors.

February

February 8, 2024: Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach and Theodora Vardouli (McGill), authors and editors of “Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design,” present the new book during an invited lecture at Florida Atlantic University.

February 23, 2024: Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach delivers a keynote address at the 4th Hemispheric Meeting of Deans and Directors of Architecture schools of North, Central and South America, held in Puebla, Mexico. Focusing on AI and architectural education, his talk links the long history of generative design methods in architecture to the current state of the art and features research by his research group at the Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s CodeLab.

March

March 1, 2024: A Carnegie Mellon team comprised of Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer, University Professor Vivian Loftness, CEE Professor Pingbo Tang, architecture graduate students Tian Li, Tianqi Liu and Jiarong Xie, and Tepper MBA student Yi Lu, publish a study in the journal “Development in The Built Environment” (IF: 8.2). The study, “Generalized building energy and carbon emissions benchmarking with post-prediction analysis,” proposes a tool that can be applied to any contiguous U.S. cities by AI techniques. 

March 8, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee travels to Kochi, India to launch a new design trophy for the National Association of Students of Architecture (NASA, India) focused on “Reimagining India’s Everyday Modernism through Adaptive Reuse.” Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria and Lee created the call and form a jury including Liliane Wong, Bie Plevoets, Adjunct Faculty Nazia Tarannum, and others. MSAECM student Tarun Krishna, former President of NASA, invites Lee to present the trophy launch and a talk on his forthcoming book, “Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures,” with PhD-AECM student Joseph Murray.

March 14, 2024: Architecture librarian Lynn Kawaratani presents “Zines: The New Generation of Radical Architecture Little Magazines” at the Association of Architecture School Librarians conference in Vancouver, highlighting a critical technique for teaching and learning about architecture.

March 21, 2024: Assistant Professor Erica Cochran Hameen delivers a power talk titled “2030 Sustainability Goals – We Got This! What's next for 2050?” during the inaugural CMU Energy Week Research Summit.

University Professor Vivian Loftness delivers a power talk titled “Accelerating U.S. Decarbonization with Investment and Innovation in the Built Environment” based on her work with the National Academy of Sciences during the inaugural CMU Energy Week Research Summit. 

March 22, 2024: Associate Professor Jeremy Ficca presents his design research project Incremental House, recipient of the Best Project Award at the ACSA Annual Meeting in Vancouver, Canada. Sponsored by the College of Distinguished Professors, the award recognizes outstanding peer reviewed research presented at the ACSA Annual Meeting and promotes research, scholarship and creative excellence.

PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents her working paper, “Embodied Ecological Histories: The Significance of the Environment in the Archive of Slavery,” at the “Divergent Environmentalism” workshop hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Department of History. She shares progress on her paper, which she will present on a panel at the World Congress of Environmental Historians in Oulu, Finland in August.

Assistant Professor Nida Rehman serves as a faculty discussant for the panel “Climate and its Elements” at the 2024 Penn EnviroLab Graduate Conference “Elemental Thinking: Troubling States of Matter“ at the University of Pennsylvania.

March 27, 2024: University Professor Vivian Loftness delivers the opening keynote at Penn State's Residential Building Design & Construction Conference “Environmental Surfing at Home for a Resilient Future.”

March 29, 2024: University Professor Vivian Loftness delivers an online workshop on “Sustainable, Smart, Resilient and Healthy Cities” to graduate students from TU Munich, Imperial College London and Neapolis University who are working on the JASS Smart City project teams in Cypress. 

April

April 1, 2024: Architecture PhD students Tian Li and Haipei Bie, Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer, University Professor Vivian Loftness, and Tepper MBA student Yi Lu publish “MEBA: AI-powered precise building monthly energy benchmarking approach,” in the top building science journal “Applied Energy” (IF: 11.2) in “Special Issue: AI in Low Carbon Emissions.”

April 5, 2024: University Professor Vivian Loftness and PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li receive a $100,000 gift agreement from China Leon Company to support their research on smart surfaces and sidewalks and publishing the “Smart Sidewalks Guidebook.”

PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li receives a $1,500 Travel Award from the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research to present her work at the Esri Geodesign Summit in the summer.

Second-year undergraduate student Christian Duckworth is awarded a $5,000 fellowship from CMU’s Community-Based Research-to-Practice Program. Working closely with Professor Steve Lee and Pittsburgh City Council members Deb Gross and Anthony Coghill, he plans to use the funding to design, prototype and test portable housing solutions that meet the performance criteria of Bill 2023-2197 and key constituencies in the city.

Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria joins an international jury for The New Age Makers Institute of Technology (NAMTECH) Architecture Design Competition. NAMTECH aims to deliver high quality skills and higher education in manufacturing and engineering disciplines through a proposed one million square foot, 150-acre campus in Ahmedabad, India. The two-stage competition involves eight invited international architecture firms with extensive backgrounds in sustainable campus planning and design.

April 13, 2024: Carnegie Mellon Architecture hosts a Retirement Reception and Roast in Honor of Steve Lee during Spring Carnival weekend. Alumnus, professor and former Head of School, Lee Retires after 43 years of service to the university.

April 18, 2024: PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li wins the 2024 Graduate Student Teaching Award during CMU’s annual Celebration of Education Awards ceremony. The committee is impressed by her nomination, including her commitment to students’ learning. 

Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach delivers a lecture at the Biennale Tecnologia in Turin, Italy. The lecture presents a critical history of generative design and discusses recent research at Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s CodeLab.

April 19, 2024: The “Journal of Architectural Education” peer-reviews and accepts a paper co-authored by Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria and Studio Professor Jonathan Kline to be published in the forthcoming “JAE 78:2 Worlding Energy Transitions,” edited by Billy Fleming and Rania Ghosn. The paper expands upon the work of the Praxis I M.Arch studio to demonstrate how design-studio pedagogy might frame emerging discourse on just transitions through architectural projects and practices that transform means of production, infrastructure and everyday life.

Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach participates in a conversation with faculty and students at the Politecnico Di Torino about architecture and artificial intelligence. 

April 27, 2024: Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria serves on the jury for the Pratt Institute's Degree Project/Thesis Award at the Institute’s Brooklyn campus.

April 28, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and PhD-BPD student Niloofar Nikookar publish “Investigating the Impact of Combined Daylight and Electric Light on Human Perception of Indoor Space” in the “Journal of Sustainability” with co-authors Mayank Goel and Siobhan Rockcastle.

April 29, 2024: A team of students in the Computational Design program – Felicia Luo, Isaac Martinotti and David Troetschel – along with CodeLab visiting scholar Federica Joe Gardella, deliver their paper, “A Multi-scalar and Multi-modal Approach to Architectural Heritage Documentation: An Interactive Digital Representation of the St. Nicholas Chapel,” at the Heri-Tech conference in Florence, Italy. The team is directed by Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach.

May

May 1, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer publishes a book chapter titled “Building Better Spaces: Using Virtual Reality to Improve Building Performance” in “Artificial Intelligence in Performance-Driven Design: Theories, Methods, and Tools” by Wiley.

May 9, 2024: PhD-CD candidate and Graduate Instructor Jinmo Rhee successfully defends his PhD dissertation, “Computational Methods for the Identification and Comparative Analysis of Urban Form Types: A Case Study of Rust Belt Cities.” His advisory committee is comprised of Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach (chair), Professor Emeritus Ramesh Krishnamurti and Professor Bhiksha Raj Ramakrishnan (Computer Science Department).

May 13, 2024: Adjunct Faculty Stephen Quick offers a tuition-free, 10-week remote course for undergraduates, “Skyglow: Where Have All the Stars Gone?” from May 13-July 19. In the course, participants study light pollution within the context of learning and applying collaborative research and its communication.

May 17, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer receives a $500,000 grant from the DOE: Energy Future Grants for the project “Larimer Build 100: A National Model to Transform Disadvantaged Communities Through Clean Energy Home Ownership.” The project is a collaboration between Allegheny County (lead jurisdiction), Carnegie Mellon University, Duquesne Light and the Larimer Consensus Group. The project is led by CMU in collaboration with the Remaking Cities Institute (Associate Professor Stefan Gruber and Studio Professor Jonathan Kline) and the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics (Assistant Professor Erica Cochran Hameen and University Professor Vivian Loftness). The “Build 100” project aims to improve energy reliability and resilience in the community by implementing clean energy solutions.

May 18, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee co-moderates the session “Exploring the Future of Design: Navigating AI and Emerging Technologies” with Katrina Kelly-Pitou (SmithGroup) at Build Pittsburgh. The session also features presentations by panelists Tian Li (PhD-BPD ’24), Alex Wing (Stantec) and Jacob Morrison (Cannon Design).

May 19, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee and PhD-AECM student Joseph Murray host the Council on Open Building's annual meeting May 18-19 in the Intelligent Workplace. The event features training in scenario planning and a thought-provoking presentation by Yujin Wu (MSCD ’25) on the “Use of Machine Learning in Capacity Analysis,” a research project she worked on with Rishab Umarani (MSAECM ’24) under Prof. Lee during the spring semester.

May 20, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and PhD-BPD student Niloofar Nikookar publish “Designing for Daylight: An Exploration of Origami-Inspired Interior Shading Screens” in the conference proceedings of the “Annual Modeling and Simulation Conference (ANNSIM),” held May 20-23, 2024 in Washington, DC.

June

June 28, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents a poster entitled “(Re)Spatializing the Past to Inform Just Future: How the Plantation is Replicated in Black Belt Towns” at the 14th International Space Syntax Symposium June 24-28 in Nicosia, Cyprus.

July

July 1, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer takes on the role of Track Chair in the MS and PhD programs in Building Performance & Diagnostics (BPD). The role was previously held by University Professor Vivian Loftness. The School thanks Vivian for her years of leadership and wishes Azadeh the best of luck in her new role.

July 31, 2024: Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach delivers the closing keynote address jointly with Theodora Vardouli at the ACM Conference in Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, SIGGRAPH 2024, in Denver, Colo. The address covers themes from their recently published book “Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design.”

August

August 21, 2024: PhD-CD candidate Yuning Wu successfully defends her PhD dissertation, “A Human-Centered Reinforcement Learning Driven Robotic Framework for Assisting Construction Workers.” Her advisory committee is comprised of Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach (advisor), Dr. Jean Oh (Co-advisor) (Robotics Institute), and Dr. Jieliang (Rodger) Luo (Autodesk Research, AI Lab).

August 23, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents the paper “Beyond the Archive: Using Placed Ecological Histories to Explore Black Environmental Relations” at The World Congress of Environmental History August 19-23 in Oulu, Finland.

September

September 6, 2024: Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach receives an Alexander Von Humboldt Foundation fellowship to research computational design practices in Germany. Daniel will be hosted by the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at Leibniz University in Hanover and will collaborate with colleagues in Stuttgart, Munich and Berlin during the fellowship.

Assistant Professor Nida Rehman is a visiting scholar at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt University, Berlin during the 2024-25 academic year.

PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman completes a six-week research placement over the summer at Forensic Architecture, London, UK, where she worked on two research projects and gave a talk to the organization about her dissertation research.

September 12, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer serves as a juror for the AIA Dallas Unbuilt Design Award alongside fellow jurors Neil Denari and Andrew McGee.

September 28, 2024: Professor & Head Omar Khan’s research in programmable elastomers is included in an invited group show, “Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design,” at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles through January 5, 2025.

October

October 1, 2024: Associate Professor Stefan Gruber is featured on David Bollier's podcast “Frontiers of Commoning.” Bollier is the director of the Reinventing the Commons Program at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics and one of the most prominent Commons scholars. Their hour-long conversation, “An Atlas of Urban Commons of the World,” was downloaded over 2,000 times and shared by platforms such as Grassroots Economics, Resilience.org and Popular Resistance, among others.

October 9, 2024: Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria and Studio Professor Jonathan Kline publish the essay, “Vignettes of Worldmaking: Framing Architectural Pedagogy through Just Transitions/Transition Design,” in the Journal of Architecture Education’s Fall 2024 issue “Worlding Energy Transitions,” edited by Billy Fleming and Rania Ghosn. Informed by the past three years of the Praxis I M.Arch studio, the essay speculates about how architecture can stage transformative practices that are at once social, local and decarbonized through three themes as design vignettes: transitioning means of production, transitioning infrastructures, and transitioning everyday life.

December

December 2, 2024: With support from a Scott Institute seed grant, principal investigator Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and her former student Tian Li (PhD-BPD ’24) are developing an optimization model for AI-driven benchmarking that accurately predicts a building’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions at daily, weekly and yearly intervals.

December 7, 2024: Special Faculty Jimmy Wei-Chun Cheng is one of three featured designers at Taiwan Design Week 2024 in Taipei. His exhibited work focuses on the theme of radical pedagogy, exploring the future of AI in design.