School of Architecture Welcomes New Faculty and Staff
Joseph Altshuler joins Detail and Fabrication as an Assistant Professor. Altshuler is cofounder of Could Be Architecture, a Chicago-based design practice, and is also the director of the Architectural Companionship Laboratory, a design research lab that works at the intersection of architecture, public art, environmental graphics, adaptive reuse, and tactical urbanism. His teaching, practice, and scholarship explore architecture’s capacity to build lively audiences, initiate serious play, and amplify participation in civic life.
Niloufar Emami also joins Detail and Fabrication as an Assistant Professor. Emami is a researcher, educator, and designer looking for gaps, intersections, and overlaps between architecture and multiple disciplines using computational tools and fabrication techniques to provide creative yet performative solutions. Emami’s interdisciplinary research focuses on computational, performance-based design regarding the structure and daylighting disciplines; the digital fabrication of innovative building components using 3D printing; and design studies of discrete elements used in facades and structures.
Lingyi Qiu joins Health and Wellbeing as a Teaching Assistant Professor. Qiu received her doctorate in Architecture and Certificate for Health Systems & Design from Texas A&M University. She has ten years of teaching experience in China and the US, covering a variety of design studios and theory courses. Her research focuses on healthy housing and community, healthy building, active living research, and general environment-behavior research and its application with an emphasis on health, disparity, and sustainability.
David Isern joins the School as the new Associate Director for Academic Affairs. He is an architect and urbanist working in Latin America and looking at urban informality in Lima, Peru, and the agency of native communities in the city development and growth. Isern is the founder of David J. Isern Studio, a speculative and research practice that intervenes at different scales as part of the design spectrum, generating creative and innovative solutions for a sustainable, diverse, and equitable future in the built environment.
Paul Fast and James Pawlikowski join the School as Kerbis Fellows, with a focus on structural engineering.