Joseph F. Thomas Visiting Professorship

Zaid Kashef Alghata is a Bahraini-Iraqi designer, researcher, and educator whose current interdisciplinary work is centered on architecture's ecological re-structuring. He is the founder and lead designer of House of ZKA, a collection of architectural explorations produced in the form of projects, exhibitions, and interviews. The work was exhibited at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. He practiced with several offices, including Gensler (Los Angeles) and UN Studio (Hong Kong) on theaters, residential towers, and mixed-use developments of various scales.

Priyanka Bista is a Nepali-Canadian architect and designer who has been a lifelong advocate for social and environmental justice. She is the cofounder and design director of KTK-BELT, the studio working with local communities in Eastern Nepal to create the “Vertical University,” a continuous forest belt that will conserve Nepal’s biodiversity and span the 8,000-meter vertical gradient from Koshi-Tappu Wildlife Reserve to Mount Kanchenjunga, the third tallest peak in the world. She earned an MA in International Architectural Regeneration and Development in 2012, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Shelter after Disaster at the Oxford Brookes University in 2013.

Jackie Joseph Paul McFarland's research and creative practice focuses on understanding and putting into context the experiences of African Americans' relationships to space and place. It asks the question, "Is it possible to have a Black architecture?" and aspires to a Black Praxis. By applying Black theoretical practices – Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, Necropolitics – he steps outside Eurocentric theory to better understand not only the Black experience, but the experiences of "othered" groups. His work allows space to be created for those who are “othered” by Eurocentric ideology to center themselves as complete human beings who have a voice and perspectives that add to the ability for architecture to create solutions for a diverse world. Jackie received his professional Master of Architecture degree from Portland State University and a Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Trevor Ryan Patt's research argues for a retheorization of the relationship between the monadological objects of architecture and their extension across the urban realm. Informed by computational analysis, design and fabrication, a more bidirectional and co-responsive dialogue between architectural and urban design is possible: this research aims to thicken the moment of interface between architecture and the city. Previously, Patt completed a Docteur ès Science (Ph.D.) in the Media × Design Lab (le Laboratoire de Design et Media) at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. His dissertation argues for a reevaluation of urban design and masterplanning that addresses the responsiveness, procedurality and openness of the city. Patt received an MArch from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he won the 2009 Digital Design Prize for his masters thesis, and a BS in Architectural Studies from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where he graduated from the Honors College with additional minors in Latin, Mathematics, and a certificate in the Study of Liberal Arts through Great Books.