Professors Andrew Freear and Cheryl Morgan will receive two of the highest honors awarded to faculty at Auburn University at the seventh annual Faculty Awards:  Celebrating Excellence ceremony on October 30.  Cheryl Morgan, Director of the Urban Studio will receive the Award for Excellence in Faculty Outreach, and Andrew Freear, Director of the Rural Studio, will receive one of the Gerald and Emily Leischuck Endowed Presidential Awards for Excellence.

The Cahaba River Society, Alabama Innovation Engine and Douglas Barrett, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have secured a $47,820 grant from SAPPI Fine Paper North America’s Ideas that Matter program.  The funding will be used to produce a storybook and video to educate people about the region around the Cahaba River and build support for stewardship and increased river access.  Entering its third year of operation, Alabama Innovation Engine is a design-based community development initiative that began as a partnership between Auburn University’s Urban Studio and the University of Alabama’s Center for Economic Development. 

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Jocelyn Zanzot and Artist Dan Neil have collaborated through their Mobile Studio with Macon County Youth to enter the National Civic Data Challenge, a competition that asks people to make information about civic health accessible and meaningful.  Their filming entry which documents a co-creative art process to engage the topic and results in landscape architecture proposals for the transformation of the built environment to increase civic health received honorable mention at the annual conference Friday September 14th 2012.

Professor and Chair of Architecture, Behzad Nakhjavan has received a three week fellowship from the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome for the 2012-2013 Academic Year .

Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and External Affairs Karen Rogers has been invited to serve on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center’s selection committee for the 2013-2014 resident research scholarships.  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, a component of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, sponsors research in American Modernism (late nineteenth century to present) by awarding stipends to historians in the fields of art, architecture and design, literature, music and photography and to museum professionals who wish to organize an exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Dr. Paul Cullen was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar with APLA’s Master of Landscape Architecture program during Summer Semester 2012.  An Associate Professor in the School of Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, Dr. Cullen teaches sculpture and practices as a sculptor.  While in Auburn, Dr. Cullen collaborated with Rod Barnett, Chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program on an interdisciplinary project – Contingency – that developed proposals for interventions at a range of sites across Alabama.  These proposals were exhibited in the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction Gallery in June 2012.

The APLA teaching team for Fall 2012 includes the following adjuncts:  Dan Bennett (CPLN), Josh Emig (INDC), Dick Hudgens (ARCH-Rural Studio), Alex Krumdieck (ARCH), Judd Langham (LAND), Jacqueline Margetts (LAND), Stacy Norman (INDC), Randal Vaughan (ARCH), and Ben Weisman (ARCH), Kelly Homan (LAND).
Phillip Ewing, a May 2012 graduate of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, was awarded the  first Richard Taylor Fellowship at MIT, where Ewing will pursue a graduate degree in architecture beginning this fall.

The first ever Southeastern Student Planning Conference, developed by the Georgia state chapter of the American Planning Association (GPA), took place in September in Columbus, Georgia.  Intended to encourage student attendance from planning programs throughout the southeast, the experience exposed attendees to other planning students and practitioners in the region.  Sixty-six city and planning graduate students from ten universities attended and of the twenty – two presented papers selected by the Student Program Committee, five APLA Master’s of Community Planning students presented four papers to assembled attendees.  Student presenters were Spencer Moore, Auburn University’s representative on the Student Program Committee and a second year student working toward a dual degree in Community Planning and Public Administration, Jaime Larzelere  (MCP) and Jes Laing (MCP) who jointly presented, Rafael Egues (MCP/MLA), and Juan Diego Donoso (MCP), and Dale Speetjens (MLA).

Auburn University’s chapter of the American Association of Architecture Students (AIAS) recently announced that their annual Internship Fair will be March 18-19, 2013 at the Auburn University Student Center.  Details regarding the event are available at http://apps.cadc.auburn.edu/aias/internship/index.htm