Instructors:

Lisa M. Abendroth is a Professor and Coordinator of the Communication Design program at the Metropolitan State University of Denver where her research embodies community-centered design focused on issues of social equity towards marginalized audiences. Working across the diverse disciplines of design, her activities include writing and critically assessing design that seeks to address under-served people, places and problems. Lisa believes design must be accountable—she demonstrated this in the critically acclaimed exhibition, “Substance: Diverse Practices from the Periphery”, which she organized and curated. She is a founding member and regular contributor to the national design network, SEED®: Social Economic Environmental Design where she is a coauthor of the SEED Evaluator design assessment tool. An expert on community-centered design practices, she lectures and presents the SEED Evaluator, its methodology and case studies in diverse educational contexts including the Public Interest Design Institute. With a passion for collaboration, Lisa promotes projects supporting culture and community through her firm culture/language/dialogue. She has lectured, presented, exhibited, and published nationally and internationally on research related to public interest design.
Marie Aquilino is professor of architectural history at Ecole Spéciale de l’Architecture (ESA) in Paris and a specialist in contemporary urban redevelopment and risk mitigation. For the past eight years she has been giving seminars on the architect’s role in disaster prevention, mitigation and sustainable recovery as a means of talking with students and professionals about architecture and social justice. Marie is the author and editor of Beyond Shelter: Architecture and Human Dignity (Metropolis Press), which aims to inform, educate, and sensitize architects to the best practices of reducing disaster risk worldwide. Marie was recently honored by the French government with a Competences and Talents Visa to develop a program at ESA that will educate and train architecture students to work in the contexts of extreme need and crisis in the developing world. She is currently part of an international working group on the reconstruction of Haiti and is Associate Program Director of BaSiC Initiative, Europe. Marie recently helped found Future City Lab, an international consortium of twelve schools of architecture and design concerned the future of urban environments. She is also one of twelve laureates of the Partner University Fund for 2011. Marie holds a Ph.D from Brown University in art and architectural history and is bilingual in French and English.
Bryan Bell, The Academic Leader of each session is Bryan Bell, the founder of Design Corps, founder of the Public Interest Design Institute, and a co-founder of SEED. Bell has supervised the Structures for Inclusion lecture series for ten years which presents best practices in community-based design. He has published two collections of essays on the topic. Bell has lectured and taught at numerous schools including the Rural Studio with Samuel Mockbee. He has received an AIA National Honor Award in Collaborative Practice. His work has been exhibited in the Venice Biennale and the Cooper Hewitt Museum Triennial. He was a Harvard Loeb Fellow in 2010-11 and a co-recipient of the 2011 AIA Latrobe Prize which is focused on public interest design. Other speakers will be national leaders of this emerging field.
Jamie Blosser founded the Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative (SNCC) to research and develop best practices promoting cultural and environmental sustainability in tribal and rural communities. The SNCC, an initiative of Enterprise Community Partners, is a research and technical assistance arm to her architectural practice as an Associate at Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, where she oversees the firm’s housing, tribal and sustainable development projects. Jamie’s work is rooted in community design. As an Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow from 2000-2003, her project received the Harvard University’s Honoring Nations award and EPA Smart Growth Award for Small Communities. The SNCC received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to document five tribal sustainability projects in the Southwest, including a green design guideline for the Navajo Housing Authority. Jamie is an on the Advisory Group for the AIA Residential Knowledge Community and received her Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been selected for inclusion in Design Re-Imagined: New Architecture on Indigenous Land, a book on contemporary Native American architecture.
Brent Brown, AIA, LEED AP, is an architect and founder of buildingcommunity WORKSHOP in Dallas, TX, where his work has been recognized locally and nationally. Recently, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in conjunction with the American Institute for Architects awarded his Congo Street Green Initiative the 2010 National AIA/HUD Secretary Award for “Community-Informed Design.” He was named the Director of the newly established Dallas City Design Studio in October 2009. The Studio is an office of the City of Dallas in partnership with the Trinity Trust Foundation and works daily to connect all of Dallas through thoughtful urban design. This past November, Brent represented the southwest region as part of the President’s Forum on Clean Energy and Public Health at the White House. Joining Administrator Lisa Jackson of the Environmental Protection Agency and Secretary Kathleen Sebelius of the Department Health & Human Services the forum discussed linkages between clean energy to immediate and lasting public health benefits and the role of community design toward the promotion of healthier lifestyles.
He earned his Bachelor of Environmental Design and Master of Architecture from Texas A & M University where he taught design.
John Cary is an advocate, speaker, and writer, who has pioneered a career at the intersection of design and social change. He is the author of The Power of Pro Bono: 40 Stories about Design for the Public Good by Architects and Their Clients. John consults with a wide range of nonprofit design, urban advocacy, and philanthropic organizations, building on seven years of experience as executive director of Public Architecture and recent leadership of Next American City. Cary is a senior fellow of the Design Futures Council, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome, a resident of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and was the 2011 commencement speaker for the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. Cary blogs daily at www.publicinterestdesign.org and can be followed on Twitter @johncary.
Lawrence Cheng joined Bruner/Cott in 1999 after managing his own firm for several years. His expertise is the design of multi-family housing and mixed use facilities. His contributions include project design, detailing, and supervision of project team activities.Mr. Cheng’s work includes the Chinatown Community Education Center in Boston and multi-family housing developments such as The Penmark Condominiums at Harrison Commons and the Channel Center luxury residential housing. He is a former Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and holds Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Science degrees from MIT.
Maurice Cox is an urban designer, architectural educator at the University of Virginia, School of Architecture and former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. He most recently served as Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts where he presided
over the largest expansion of direct grants to the design fields. Cox served as a Charlottesville City Councilor for six years before becoming the mayor of that city, from 2002-2004. His experience merging architecture, politics and design education led to his being named one of “20 Masters of Design” in 2004 by Fast Company Business Magazine. He is also a founding partner of RBGC Architecture, Research and Urbanism (1996-2006). Their design for a New Rural Village in Bayview, Virginia received numerous national design awards as well as being featured on CBS’s “60 Minutes” and in the documentary film “This Black Soil”. A recipient of the 2009 Edmund Bacon Prize, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2004-05 Loeb Fellowship and the 2006 John Hejduk Award for Architecture, Cox received his architectural education from the Cooper Union School of Architecture.
pittsburghlecturer Ronit Eisenbach, University of Maryland Associate Professor of Architecture and Kibel Gallery Chair, is an architect, public artist and curator who employs design to explore how the perception of subjective, invisible and ephemeral objects affects understanding and experience of place. Through the construction of participatory, collaborative, temporary site-specific environments and events, Eisenbach stimulates public dialogue about the world we build for ourselves. Venues have included: The Detroit Institute of Arts; the streets of Tel Aviv; Lake Anne Plaza, Reston, Virginia; Galleri Rom, Oslo, Norway; and Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, Italy. Publications include, “Installations by Architects: Explorations in Building and Design” and “Ruth Adler Schnee: A Passion for Color.” Her work has been supported by the Center for Creative Research, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center, the Graham Foundation, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the University of Michigan Arts of Citizenship program, and the Maryland State Arts Council. Articles by Eisenbach and reviews of her work have recently appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Public Art Review, The Washington Post, Washington Times, Sculpture Magazine, and Metropolis. Eisenbach is a 2006 Beverly Willis Architecture Fellow, a 2009 Center for Creative Research Fellow, a 2011 MacDowell Colony Fellow and serves on the National Building Museum’s Education Committee. www.roniteisenbach.com
Heather flemming_DK Heather Fleming is a designer, an engineer, and an entrepreneur motivated by social inequality. In 2005, she led a volunteer group of engineers and designers focused on humanitarian design projects via a professional chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB). Three years later she co-founded Catapult Design in San Francisco to make design and technical capacity accessible to entrepreneurs and organizations working within disadvantaged communities. Heather is a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow, a program aimed at high-potential young leaders with new approaches for transformational impact and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. She previously worked in the Silicon Valley product development consulting world and has nine years of experience working with multi-disciplinary teams to design, develop, and deliver product solutions for a diverse range of companies. Heather was also previously an Adjunct Lecturer at Stanford University in the Mechanical Engineering department and a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts in the Industrial Design department. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Navajo Chamber of Commerce on the Navajo Nation and chairs a committee within ASME’s Engineering for Global Development initiative. Heather has a BS in Product Design from Stanford University.
John Folan is the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Professor of Architecture, Founder and Directorof the Urban Design Build Studio (UDBS), track Chair of the Masters of Urban Design (MUD) Program, and member of the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI) at CarnegieMellon University. Since joining the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of 2009, John and the UDBS have been working with challenged urban communities in Allegheny County on the development and implementation of catalytic projects through participatory design processes. The work has been recognized with the 2010 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award and the 2011 AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award. The work in Pittsburgh represents an extension of efforts in university affiliated community based design and construction, initiated while John was tenured faculty member at the University of Arizona. In Tucson, Arizona John co-founded, co-directed, and served as an executive board member of the Drachman Design Build Coalition (DDBC); a university affiliated, non-profit, 501(c)3 corporation dedicated to the design and construction of environmentally specific, energy efficient, affordable housing prototypes. Projects with the DDBC implemented in Tucson’s Urban Empowerment Zone have been recognized with three consecutive AIA Arizona Honor Awards for Residence of The Year and the 2011 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award. Urban strategies employed in the implementation of the DDBC work influenced the collaborative development of the Drachman Institute’s legislative proposal for regionally specific sustainability guidelines. The work was recognized with first place award in the 2008 National Urban Policy Initiative Competition (NUPIC).
Anne Fougeron has provided architectural services in the Bay Area for over 25 years and has been principal of Fougeron Architecture since 1986. Projects range from feasibility studies to building rehabilitation to new construction projects in the institutional, commercial, health- care and residential sectors. Fougeron is personally involved in all aspects of a project, from inception to completion, serving as the main client point-of-contact. Fougeron Architecture has frequently been recipients of local and national awards and have been featured in national and international publications. Anne is on the Board of Directors for the Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland and is the Organizing Committee Advisory Board Chair for the AIA Monterey Design Conference. She has taught architectural design to both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and at the California College of Arts.
Anne Frederick, as the founding director of Hester Street Collaborative (HSC), has worked to develop a community design practice that responds to the needs of HSC’s local neighborhood of the Lower East Side/Chinatown as well as the needs of under-resourced NYC communities city-wide. Her unique approach to community design integrates education and youth development programming with participatory art, architecture, and planning strategies. This approach is rooted in partnership and collaboration with various community based organizations, schools, and local residents. Prior to founding HSC, Anne worked as an architect at Leroy Street Studio Architecture
and as a design educator at Parsons School of Design and the New York Foundation for Architecture.
Mark Goldman is an Architectural Designer and General Contractor from Taos, New Mexico. The recipient of the 2004 Distinguished Alumni Award in Practice from the Boston Architectural College (BAC) where he was the Dean Arcangelo Cascieri Scholar, he founded Onyx Construction/Design in Taos, NM to integrate traditional regional unfired earthen architecture into commercial and non-profit projects. Work by Mark Goldman has been featured in Good Deeds, Good Design, Fine Homebuilding Magazine, New Mexico Magazine and the New Mexico Green Guide. The Dream Tree Project, a shelter for at-risk teens designed and built by Onyx, received a HUD Economic Initiative Grant for their Phase #2 Infill Transitional Housing Building. In 2009, Mark was one of the founding instructors of the University of New Mexico/Taos Green Technology Program and is the coordinator of the newly formed UNM/Taos Rural Housing Initiative. Current projects include the Taos County Economic Development Corporation (TCEDC) Mobile Matanza Food Security project and the Taos Habitat for Humanity ReStore. He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts from the University of California at Santa Barbara and serves on the Taos Community Foundation’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board.
Firm Foundation - Michael Haggerty bw Michael Haggerty is an urban planner and designer who lives in New York City. He is a co-director of Solo Kota Kita , an Indonesia-based urban planning organization that works with city residents and government officials to understand the complexities of the built environment. Solo Kota Kita’s projects have included community-based mapping, post-disaster planning, climate change vulnerability assessment, city development strategies, and public space design in cities across Indonesia. Michael is Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture Programs in Sustainable Planning and Development.
Anna Heringer is an architectural designer from Salzburg, Austria. In 2005-2006 Anna’s diploma thesis, a school built from mud and bamboo, came to fruition in Rudrapur, Bangladesh. In 2007-2008 she coordinated students from Bangladesh and Austria to build a vocational school and a pilot project on rural housing in Rudrapur. Anna led the studio BASEhabitat– architecture for development at the University of Arts in Linz, Austria from 2008-2011. She has lectured worldwide and conducted international workshops in Bangladesh and Austria. Since 2010 she has been the honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair Earthen Architecture Programme. Her work was shown at MoMA in New York, la Loge in Brussels, Cité d`architecture and du patrimoine in Paris, the MAM in Sao Paulo, the Aedes Galery in Berlin and at the Venice Biennale in 2010. She recieved a number of awards such as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2007), the AR Emerging Architecture Awards (2006 and 2008), the Archprix – Hunter Douglas Award (2006) and most recently the Global Award for Sustainable
Architecture in 2011. She is currently a 2011-2012 Harvard Loeb Fellow.
Jeff Hou has taught in the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington since 2001 where he served as the Graduate Program Coordinator, prior to becoming the Department Chair. Prof. Hou’s research, teaching, and practice focus on engaging marginalized communities and citizens through community design, design activism, and cross-cultural learning. In a career that spans across the Pacific, he has worked with indigenous tribes, farmers, and fishers in Taiwan, neighborhood residents in Japan, villagers in China, and inner-city immigrant youths and elders in North American cities, in projects ranging from conservation of wildlife habitats to rebuilding of indigenous villages and design of urban open space and streetscapes. He is the editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanism and the Remaking of Contemporary Cities (2010) and a co-author of Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Urban Community Gardens in Seattle (with Julie Johnson and Laura Lawson) (2009). He is a contributor to Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (2008) and Companion to Urban Design (2011). His research on innovative practices of community participation and design education has also been published in Journal of Planning Education and Research, Landscape Journal, Journal of Architectural Education, and Open House International. Prof. Hou is a recipient of 2011 CELA Award for Excellence in Service-learning Education and the 2010 Great Places Book Award, as well as grants from the Landscape Architecture Foundation and Worldwide Universities Network. He has served on the board of the Association for Community Design, and currently co-chairs the advisory committee for IDEA Space, a community design and resource center in Seattle’s International District. As a coordinator for the Pacific Rim Community Design Network, he helped organize the first Conference on Democratic Design in the Pacific Rim in Berkeley in 1998. Prof. Hou has a multidisciplinary background in architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and public art. He received his PhD in Environmental Planning and Master of Architecture from University of California, Berkeley. He also has a Master of Landscape Architecture from University of Pennsylvania and Bachelor of Architecture from the Cooper Union.
Firm Foundation - Stephen Kennedy bw Stephen Kennedy is an urban planner and designer working as a Design & Technology Fellow for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Washington, D,.C. and is a co-founder of the Urban Launchpad, a social-venture dedicated to seeding and scaling urban data experiments in places that need it most. Prior to switching to urban-scale projects, Stephen cut his creative teeth designing lighting, furniture, packaging, soft goods, websites, and maps as an industrial designer.
Rebuild Sudan - Jill Kurtz bwsm Jill Kurtz earned her B Arch from Kansas State University and began a traditional architecture path. But she had a change in direction after she spent a year in India as a volunteer designer with eMi where she designed schools, hospitals, community shelters and orphan homes. She quickly realized true sustainability is not a trendy gimmick but a strategy survival in the developing world and in response, moved to San Francisco where to focus on developing sustainability strategies and founded reBuild Consulting, a green building firm committed to providing affordable LEED and sustainability advising. Currently, she also serves as graduate faculty at Kansas State University’s College of Architecture, Planning, & Design where she teaches an interdisciplinary class on Public Interest Design. Since 2008, Jill has been involved in Rebuild Sudan and serves as Board President and team lead for the school project. She now works remotely on these initiatives from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania where she lives with her husband, Preston.
marie anna lee Marie Anna Lee is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of the Pacific whose research focuses on multi-disciplinary collaboration, community-based design and cultural preservation.. Previously, she taught Communication Design at Metropolitan State College of Denver (2005-07) and art and design at School of Creative Media (SCM), City University of Hong Kong (2007-09). While At SCM, Lee oversaw the Guizhou Ethnic Minorities Project at School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. This project documented the cultural heritage and traditions of a group of Kam minority villages in the Guizhou province of China through photographs, video and audio recordings. After joining the Pacific in 2009, Lee has focused on preservation of the crafts and designs unique to the village of Dimen, the hub of all the other villages. Since video recordings and photography alone could not effectively document the local crafts processes in their entirety, Lee and her Pacific students apprenticed with the local artisans to master their techniques. Lee also collected indigenous design motifs to be used on materials promoting the village and selling its goods abroad. In collaboration with Dimen Dong Eco-Museum, she designed a series of packaging solutions for local produce and the Museum’s website providing information on Dimen and its goods. Lee holds a BFA and an MFA in Graphic Design from Colorado State University and a BA in Advertising from Michigan State University. She practices design and exhibits artwork in USA, China and the Czech Republic.
LEITE headshot Margarette Leite teaches architectural design and building tectonics at Portland State University.  Her pedagogical mission is to provide opportunities for students to engage in design processes and design/build activities that serve communities in need. These initiatives have garnered awards for civic engagement and have been the subjects of numerous publications and documentaries.  Her work with students includes projects with local school districts for the design of sustainable learning spaces as well as a current statewide initiative to build and distribute a greener, affordable modular classroom across Oregon and the nation. The SAGE Classroom was awarded an international SEED award in 2012.  Her tectonics classes focus on the responsible use of sustainable and reusable materials as well as the promotion of hands-on making as a life-long habit for students of architecture.  In addition, she is a partner in PLDP Architecture, a firm that designs and promotes sustainable buildings and communities with particular emphasis on disaster relief.
Rosa F. Keller Building - Nadine Maleh bwsm Nadine Maleh is the Director of Creating Homes for CommunitySolutions. In this position Nadine is responsible for the development of supportive housing and community development through local partnership and the implementation of strategic development initiatives that will support the mission of the organization. Nadine has extensive experience in planning, design and construction supervision for housing development projects. Her expertise includes sustainable design, program development based on needs of diverse populations, and the integration of health concerns into building design. Nadine has been responsible for overseeing the design and development of over 1000 units of affordable housing with over 800 of those units built sustainably.She is a member of the Architectural League of New York, Architecture for Humanity, the Housing Committee for the Regional Catastrophic Preparedness Grant Program in the NorthEast, and has been a visiting critic and lecturer at Columbia University, Pratt School of Architecture, Parsons School of Design, and Yale University.  Nadine earned her B.A. in architectural studies from Tufts University, and her Masters of Architecture with Honors from Illinois Institute of Technology.
Michael Murphy is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, which is a design firm geared towards improving health outcomes in resource-limited settings. In addition to leading the design and construction of the Butaro District Hospital in Rwanda, which opened in January of 2011, Michael’s firm MASS has been the recipient of the 2010 Design Futures Council Emerging Leaders Scholarship, chosen as one of Fast Company Magazine’s “Master of Design” and awarded as a Metropolis Magazine 2011 “Game Changer”. MASS was recently selected as a finalist for MoMA PS1’s 2011 Young Architects Program and was honored alongside IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown for its contribution to the field of design. MASS Design Group currently has offices in Boston, Massachusetts, Kigali, Rwanda, and Port au Prince Haiti. In 2012 MASS opened the Girubuntu Primary School in Kigali, and broke ground on several projects in Haiti, including the new GHESKIO Tuberculosis Facility constructed out of locally fabricated materials. Michael has a Masters in Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, has taught courses on design for infection control at Harvard University’s school of Public Health, and was a 2011 Entrepreneur in Residence at Clark University as well as a Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critic at the Boston Architectural College. Michael with partner Alan Ricks recently accepted the award for 2012 Designer of the Year from Contract Magazine and the Curry Stone Design Award for 2012.
Michael Newman has been the Senior Associate at CAPA for 12 years. Projects have included affordable housing, community planning designs, commercial and institutional projects, and market rate developments. His work has focused on design innovation for issues of sustainability and affordability in housing and social justice projects. Other concentrations have been on constructability and professional practice topics. Mike is co-director of SHED Studio, a Chicago-based studio committeed to sustainability, social justice issues and innovation in design working extensively with not-for-profit clients. SHED Studio’s expertise is in using a participatory community-based process to work with a diverse group of clients, and develop solutions that not only meet needs but respond in a multi-dimensional way to the mission of the client and the community. Mike has been an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago for the past 6 years, teaching design studios, building science and preparatory classes for architectural licensure. Previously, Mike taught at Archeworks, an innovative design school that develops solutions for projects focusing on social issues.
Maa-bara - Runo Okiomah bw Ogheneruno Okiomah, LEED AP, is a Nigerian-American designer, architectural educator and social-entrepreneur. Her research interests lie at the nexus of sustainable design and economic development. She has served as an Assistant Professor at Hampton University Department of Architecture since 2011. Through co-teaching design studios and coordinating a community design workshop, she demonstrates to her students that small-scale design interventions are capable of catalyzing social change.Concurrently, Ogheneruno is the CEO and Co-Founder of Maa-Bara, LLC, where she directs a social enterprise focused on growing a youth culture of agro-innovation in Sub-Saharan Africa. Originally from Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, she witnessed the intergenerational poverty of agro-based livelihoods stifled by over 50 years of oil pollution. With the focused of designing sustainable solutions for her community, she graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelors degree in Architecture from The University of Texas at Arlington (2006) and a Master in Architecture from MIT (2011). Her research concentration on designing sustainable ecosystems for socioeconomic development in marginalized communities, culminated in her most notable work- her thesis entitled, “Maa-Bara: Catalyzing Change in Nigeria’s Niger Delta.” “Maa-Bara” means “Water-Farm” in Ogoni language and she collaborated with an oil-polluted fishing community and an oil company to create a mutually beneficial vision for a thriving agro-producing hub. Ogheneruno’s research received the MIT Schlossman Travel Grant (2010), MIT Architecture Department Thesis Archiving Honor (2010), SA+P Ralph Adams Cram Thesis Award for Excellence in Interdisciplinary Research (2012) and ACSA ARCHIVE 100: Being Resourceful Competition, Honorable Mention (2011). Partnering with co-founders Elisha Goodman at MIT and later Timo Lassak, she grew the thesis into a start-up called Maa-Bara, LLC. They equip African youths with entrepreneurial skills, knowledge and technology to convert kitchen waste into food through low-tech and locally sourced aquaponics technology- growing fish and vegetables symbiotically. They won the $10,000 Muhammad Yunus Challenge at MIT IDEAS Global Challenge (2011), MIT Sloan AFRICA Innovate Business Plan finalists (2011), Design Corps SEED Awards (2012) and Pilot Projects’ Culture-Structure Award for $20,000 worth of consulting services (2013). During the summer 2012, Ogheneruno and her team successfully deployed a 1,000-liter pilot project growing fish and vegetables in partnership with Lenya School along Lake Victoria, in Kenya. Currently, the project benefits over 500 students; of which 2/3 eat one meal a day and 1/3 are HIV-AIDS orphans. She is currently fundraising and securing partnerships to scale-up operations to impact 1,500 students in summer 2013. She believes that a youth culture of innovation will help grow a generation of Africans empowered to design solutions to address their current and future contextual challenges.
Sergio Palleroni is a Senior Fellow of the new Center for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University, and a founding member and faculty of the federally funded Green Building Research Lab. Professor Palleroni’s research and fieldwork for the last two decades has been in the methods of integrating sustainable practices to improve the lives of communities worldwide typically underserved. In 1988, to serve the needs of these communities he founded an academic outreach program that would later become the BASIC Initiative (www.basicinitiative.org), a service-learning fieldwork program. Today, the BASIC Initiative continues to serve the poor in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the U.S. In addition, Professor Palleroni has worked and been a consultant on sustainable architecture and development in the developing world since the 1980s, both for not-for-profit agencies and governmental and international agencies such as UNESCO, World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua and Taiwan. Palleroni holds a Master of Science in Architectural Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Oregon.
David Perkes is an architect and Associate Professor for Mississippi State University. He is the founding director of the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio, a professional outreach program of the College of Architecture, Art + Design. The design studio was established soon after Hurricane Katrina and is providing planning and architectural design support to many Mississippi Gulf Coast communities and non-profit organizations. The design studio works in close partnership with the East Biloxi Coordination and Relief Center and has assisted in the renovation of hundreds of damaged homes and over fifty new house projects in East Biloxi. The Biloxi house projects were awarded an Honor Citation from the Gulf States Region AIA in 2007. David has a Master of Environmental Design degree from Yale School of Architecture,
a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Utah, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Utah State University. In 2004 David was awarded a Loeb Fellowship from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.at Santa Barbara and serves on the Taos Community Foundation’s Affordable Housing Advisory Board.
John Peterson, AIA, Founder & President, Public Architecture, San Francisco, CA. Peterson created Public Architecture in 2002 and joined its staff fulltime in October 2008. John serves as the chief spokesperson and strategist for Public Architecture as well as design director and a member of the board of directors. John maintains a small private architectural practice, Peterson Architects. John is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Nice Modernist award from Dwell magazine and the Jefferson Award for Public Service. In 2009, John was recognized alongside Executive Director John Cary with the 2009 Designer of the Year Award from Contract Magazine. John earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. During the 2005-2006 academic year, he was a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Emily Pilloton founded the nonprofit design firm Project H to use creative capital to improve communities and public education from the inside out in January 2008. Project H’s local initiatives range from small local interventions (water collection and reuse, architectural schemes for foster care facilities, craft-based homeless enterprises) to deep engagements in the public education system. Emily was named one of Fast Company’s Masters of Design, has spoken on the TED stage and appeared on The Colbert Report . She is the author of Design Revolution: 100 Products that Empower People, which was publicized by means of an unconventional book tour in which Pilloton visited 35 towns in 75 days to promote design for good, while traveling a 1972 Airstream filled with 40 of the 100 products. Emily holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of California Berkeley, and a Master of Product Design from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Dan Pitera is the Executive Director of the Detroit Collaborative Design Center at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. With the view that “design” is an essential force in establishing human relations, the Design Center is dedicated to fostering university and community partnerships that create inspired and sustainable neighborhoods and spaces for all people. The Design Center provides not only design services but also empowers residents to facilitate their own process of urban regeneration. Dan was a 2004-2005 Loeb Fellow at Harvard University. He was a finalist for both the 2008-2009 Rafael Vinoly Architects Grants in Architecture and the 2006-2007 James Stirling Memorial Lectures on the City. Under his direction since 2000, the Design Center was included in the US Pavilion of the 2008 Venice Biennale in Architecture and recently was awarded the 2009 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Design Excellence for the St.Joseph Rebuild Center in New Orleans. The Design Center was the recipient of the NCARB Prize in 2002 and 2009 and was included in the international exhibit/conference ArchiLab in 2001 and 2004 in Orleans, France. The Design Center has also been the awarded the 2002 Dedalo Minosse International Prize. In 1998, Dan was the Hyde Chair of Excellence at the University of Nebraska. He has lectured and taught extensively throughout the North America, South America, and Europe.
Alan J. Plattus is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Yale University School of Architecture, where he teaches courses on architectural history and theory, urban history and design, and directs the School’s China Studio. He founded and directs the Yale Urban Design Workshop, a community design center that has undertaken urban design and building projects throughout Connecticut and around the world. Current projects include plans for the cities of West Haven, New London, and Bridgeport, Connecticut, a 13-unit affordable housing project in Bridgeport, a study for the Naugatuck Valley Industrial Heritage Corridor, and the development of a Peace Park along the Jordan River between Israel and Jordan. Professor Plattus has lectured and published on the history of cities and civic pageantry, as well as on modern architecture and urbanism. Research interests include industrial and post-industrial cities in the United States and abroad, urban design history and theory, and sustainable urbanism. He lives along the northeast corridor between New Haven, Boston and Mt. Desert Island in Maine.
Rashmi Ramaswamy has been a project manager and Senior Associate for McBride Kelley Baurer, a Chicago architectural firm, since 2005. She has been involved in several projects in Chicago for not-for-profit clients including a campus for at-risk teen youth, a transitional
shelter for women, HUD 202 senior housing and a daycare facility. Rashmi has led MKB’s sustainable effort, and is a LEED Accredited Professional. Rashmi is co-director of SHED Studio, a Chicago-based studio committeed to sustainability, social justice issues and innovation in design working extensively with not-for-profit clients. SHED Studio’s expertise is in using a participatory community-based process to work with a diverse group of clients, and develop solutions that not only meet needs but respond in a multi-dimensional way to the mission of the client and the community.
Rashmi serves on the boards of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and archi-treasures, and is a member of USGBC, Chicago Chapter Programs Committee.
Alan_bio_bw_headshot Alan Ricks is the Co-Founder of MASS Design Group, which is an design firm geared towards improving health outcomes in resource-limited settings.  As Chief Operating Officer, he manages the firm’s multiple offices where he has overseen rapid growth, while leading projects with NGOs, foreign and domestic governments, as well as in the private sector.  Projects of note include: The Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, a finalist for 2011 World Architecture Festival Health Project of the Year, the GHESKIO Tuberculosis Hospital in Haiti, research on infection control and health facility design for USAID, and policy writing for the Liberian Ministry of Health.  He was named to Forbes Magazine’s 2012, 30 under 30 list of the most influential people in art and design and received Contract magazine’s Designer of the Year award with co-founder Michael Murphy in 2012.  Alan received his Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from Colorado College and his Masters in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Firm Foundation - Alice Shay bw Alice Shay is an urban planner and designer living in New York City. She currently works with WXY Architecture and Urban Design on a range of public realm planning and design projects, from waterfront infrastructure to brownfields opportunity areas to strategic regional planning. Before working with WXY, she collaborated with Solo Kota Kita on Firm Foundation and City Development Strategies with UN-HABITAT in Indonesia. She has also developed research on urban void space with the Strelka Institute in Moscow and public realm strategies in London.
Katie Swenson has directed Enterprise’s Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellowship since 2006 which brings first-rate design and green building assistance to community development
organizations around the country. Prior to joining Enterprise, Katie was founder and executive director of the Charlottesville Community Design Center (CCDC) in Virginia. In 2009, Katie published “Growing Urban Habitats: Seeking a New Housing Development Model,” co-authored with William Morrish and Susanne Schindler. Other works include “Louisiana Speaks Pattern Book: Green Building Guidelines;” “Growing Urban Habitats,” an essay in “Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism;” and two chapters in the forthcoming “Activist Architecture: Philosophy and Practice of the Community Design Center.” Her work has been cited in trade and popular publications, including Metropolis, Metropolitan Home, Architecture, L’Architecture Au’Jourdhui and Family Circle. Katie’s awards include the EPA Energy Star Award, the Eldon Field Woods Design Professional of the Year Award, the Commonwealth Environmental Leadership Award and the Sara McArthur Nix Fellowship for Travel and Research in France. She received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and her master’s in architecture from the University of Virginia.
Philip Szostak has over 30 years of experience in a broad variety of architectural design
projects. A graduate of NC State University’s School of Design, he first opened Philip Szostak Associates (PSA) in 1980 where he demonstrated exceptional abilities in designing projects ranging in scale from small renovations to complex, multi-million dollar facilities.
Philip was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2009 and was the 2010 co-recipient of AIA North Carolina’s Kamphoefner Award for outstanding contributions to modernism. Philip is responsible for the design and documentation of all projects in the firm. His recent projects include the Durham Performing Arts Center; the Walltown Recreation Center in Durham, North Carolina; the Theater Annex in Durham, North Carolina, the Columbia Street Annex Residential Development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; and the New American Home residential development in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Emilie Taylor, as Design Build Manager at the Tulane City Center, works to coordinate the people, designs, and materials of the TCC’s built projects. Emilie’s recent community
design build studio projects include the Storypod, and Project Ish at Hagar’s House. The current design build project, a 4 acre youth farm known as Grow Dat, is the City Center’s most ambitious project yet. Emilie is a part of the founding team that established the URBANbuild program at Tulane University and was the project manager for the first four houses. Emilie’s education includes a technical building background at the University of Southern Mississippi followed by a Masters Degree in Architecture at Tulane. She is actively involved in university design|build and advocates for the engagement of such programs with the local community. Emilie’s creative practice includes a documentary film on self taught builders and exploring the intersection between formal and informal architectural practice.
Gail Vittori, LEED AP, is Co-Director of the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, a non-profit design firm established in 1975 dedicated to sustainable planning, design and demonstration where she has worked since 1979. She was 2009 Chair of the US Green Building Council’s Board of Directors and currently serves on Board of the Green Building Certification Institute. Since 1993, Ms. Vittori has coordinated the Center’s Sustainable Design in Public Buildings Program, including serving as a Sustainable Design Consultant for the Pentagon Renovation Program’s Commissioning Team from 1999 to 2006, numerous City of Austin design projects including Texas’ first public sector LEED® certified building, the redevelopment of the 709-acre former Austin airport including piloting LEED for Neighborhood Development, the new Austin Federal Courthouse with Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, and the first LEED-Platinum certified hospital in the world, Dell Children’s Medical Center of Central Texas. Since 2000, Ms. Vittori has been a catalyst for several national initiatives focused on greening the health care sector and advancing environmental health considerations in green building. She currently serves as a Co-Coordinator of the Green Guide for Health Care and is Founding Chair of the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Healthcare core committee (2004-2008). Ms. Vittori was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design from 1998-1999, and attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where she studied economics. Ms. Vittori is on the advisory boards of Natural Home magazine and Environmental Building News. She is co-author, with Robin Guenther FAIA, of Sustainable Healthcare Architecture, published by Wiley and Sons in 2008, was featured as an Innovator: Building a Greener World in TIME Magazine in March 2007 and, with Pliny Fisk III, in Texas Monthly’s 35th year anniversary issue (February 2008) in the article ‘35 People Who Will Shape Our Future’. In 2009, Secretary Janet Napolitano appointed Ms. Vittori to the Department of Homeland Security’s Sustainability
and Efficiency Task Force.
Barbara Brown Wilson is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development (CSD) and an Assistant Professor of Community and Regional Planning and Sustainable Design in the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. She has a PhD in Community and Regional Planning and a Masters in Architectural History from UT, and her research interests include value-based building codes, sustainable community development, and green affordable housing. In addition to administering the research, education, and outreach efforts at the CSD generally, Wilson also oversees the Public Interest Design Summer Program and the Central Texas Sustainability Indicators Project. She is a co-founder of the Austin Community Design and Development Center, a nonprofit design center that provides high quality green design and planning services to lower income households and the organizations that serve them. Dr. Wilson is passionate about serving her community and recently received the Bank of America Local Hero award for her efforts in Austin.
danielwinterbottom Daniel Winterbottom, RLA, FASLA is a landscape architect and Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington.  Mr. Winterbottom holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His research interests include the landscape as a cultural expression, ecological urban design, community participatory design and service learning and restorative/healing landscapes.  In 1995 he developed a design/build program, through which he and his students work with communities to design and build projects that provide amenities and address social of ecological concerns.  Projects include a public wash facility in rural Mexico, a garden for children with HIV/AIDS in New York City, healing gardens at cancer Lifeline in Seattle and a Mother/Child garden at Bedford Hills Correctional facility near NYC and a therapeutic park for the families who work in the largest garbage dump in Guatemala. Mr. Winterbottom developed and uses a participatory design process in these service-learning projects to create responsive design solutions. In 2006 he developed the Healing Garden Certificate program at the University of Washington.His work documenting casitas, vernacular Puerto Rican gardens in N.Y.C., has been exhibited in Museo Del Barrio and Ramapo College.His work on Casitas, healing gardens, sustainable design and service-learning teaching have appeared in Nursing, Northwest Public Health, Places, the New York Times, Seattle Times, Seattle P.I., Landscape Architecture Magazine and Garden Design and he has written and contributed to several books a sustainable design and building.  He continues to travel and widely lectures about his work. His awards include the Council of Educators of Landscape Architecture Outstanding Educator award, 2007, American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Community Service 2007, the University of Washington 2006 S. Sterling Munro Public Service Teaching Award and was inducted as a fellow in ASLA in 2011..  He has completed community design/build  projects in Seattle, New York City, Bedford Hills New York, Mexico, Guatemala, Bosnia/Herzegovina and Croatia
Michael Zaretsky is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture and Interior Design (SAID) in the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati. He is a licensed Architect, a LEED Accredited Professional and a consultant on sustainable and humanitarian design. His research is focused around culturally, economically, technologically and environmentally responsive design for communities in need. His published work includes the book Precedents in Zero-Energy Design: Architecture and Passive Design in the 2007 Solar Decathlon (Routledge Press, 2009) and he is co-editor (with Dr. Adrian Parr) of New Directions in Sustainable Design (Routledge Press, 2010). In addition, he has had several articles published in architectural journals and presented at conferences around the world on Sustainability, Humanitarian Design and Appropriate Technologies. Michael works with the non-profit organization Village Life Outreach Project where he is the director of the Roche Health Center Design Committee, a group that has been developing a zero-energy health center in rural Tanzania. Following extensive research with the local community and within the University of Cincinnati, the Roche Health Center will be the first-ever permanent health care facility in this region and will provide health care to approximately 20,000 villagers. The building design and construction provides a reproducible, low-cost, durable structure made of all local materials and techniques.