Michael Hricak, FAIA, has been appointed a Regional Director for the AIA College of Fellows, using his strong ties with the profession and education to promote licensing and participation in the Intern Development Program (IDP).

Heritage conservation program director Trudi Sandmeier curated a tour of ‘70s and ‘80s architecture in Venice, CA as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. programming.  She also recently helped to establish the new docomomo_US/Southern California chapter.

New appointments in Landscape Architecture include Alexander Robinson and Alison Hirsch as tenure track Assistant Professors and Charles Anderson and Aroussiak Gabrielian as visiting faculty.

Landscape Architecture Graduate Student Tina Chee has been named one of four 2013 National Olmsted Scholarship finalists. She earned this honor in 2012 as well and thus has the distinction for both years of her MLA degree program.

DSH // architecture, the firm of Adjunct Associate Professor Eric Haas, received 1st Place for small educational facilities in the Modular Building Institute’s 2013 Awards of Distinction for the St. James’ Preschool.

Adjunct Assistant Professor Valery Augustin, AIA, was a panelist at a symposium titled “Does Architecture Matter?” at the Getty Center. A series of Valery’s drawings were selected for the d3:Sketch exhibition at The Lincoln Center Center Gallery in New York.                                        

Assistant professor Alvin Huang was awarded the 2013 AIA Comittee on Design Scholarship to attend the AIA Regional Modernism Conference in Palm Springs, and the 2013 Dale Taylor Visiting Lectureship at the University of Calgary Faculty of Environmental Design which included an exhibition, a lecture, and a 1 week design/build/fabricate student workshop focused on emergent design technologies.  

Alexander Robinson was recently appointed a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Southern California. Also, as part of his on-going research on landscape infrastructures, he led a team proposing summer parks in the LA River that is currently a finalist in a $100k grant and ideas competition. 

Tom Marble’s work has appeared in The Architect’s Newspaper, MONU Magazine, LA Times Magazine, and Metropolis; his After the city, this (is how we live) was published by the LA Forum for Architecture & Urban Design in 2008; he led an urban design studio Urban Successionism in Colorado Springs, at Colorado College Spring 2012; and he is at work on The Expediter, a multi-media urban noir to be completed in late 2013.

Adjunct professor Lorcan O’Herlihy’s firm, LOHA, is currently designing housing projects that will serve UCLA and UC Santa Barbara students and faculty. Lorcan has been honored with nominations for the 2013 Marcus Prize in Architecture and the 2013 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award, and his past work will feature in spring exhibitions at the A+D Museum and MOCA. In addition to his teaching, Lorcan will lecture this fall at the Otis College of Art and Design, the AIA Arizona State Conference, and the AIA Colorado Design Conference.

Lecturer Scott Uriu‘s work is in the Exhibitions: Never Built, Architecture and Design Museum (A+D Museum), opening July 2013.  Baumgartner + Uriu, (B+U) exhibition, INCITE, Bangalore India, Opening June 8th 2013.  Archilab 2013, FRAC center, Orleans, France, opening September 2013.  Uriu’s work is also included in the Publications: Equalbooks-B+U Frank and Kim residence Peakpack, April 2013, DE Architect– B+U animated Apertures, April 2013, Concept magazine- B+U rethinking the window DNA, April 2013, FUTURE magazine- B+U Keelung harbor Cruise ship terminal competition, April 2013 and B1 magazine– B+U animated Apertures, April 2013.  Uriu’s office has received an Architizer A+ Award February 14th, 2013 for “Animated Apertures” Special Mention in the Architecture +Sustainability category.

Professor G. Goetz Schierle was invited to design fabric structures and teach a seminar at Xian University of Architecture and Technology.

Karen M. Kensek has won the USC Mellon Mentoring Award.  The award is given annually to honor individual faculty for helping build a supportive academic environment at USC through faculty-to-student and faculty-to-faculty mentoring.

Joon-Ho Choi is an Assistant Professor of Building Science. Prior to taking the position, he worked as an assistant professor in the Dept. of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University.   Dr. Choi’s primary research interests are in the areas of advanced controls for high performance buildings, bio-sensing controls in the built environment, smart building enclosure, passive building strategies, and human-centered building environmental control.  Six research papers have been published in prestigious journals, such as Building and Environment, and Energy and Buildings, based on his work for recent three years. As an interdisciplinary researcher, he has participated in multiple research projects sponsored by governmental agencies, industry partners and research grant programs including General Services Administration (GSA), Boston Society of Architects/AIA, Green Building Alliance (GBA), ALCOA, SIEMENS, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and UNEP. His research outcomes have been published on prestigious international journals including “Building and Environment”, and “Energy and Buildings”. He is currently a technical committee member of American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), and is an active member of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality (ISIAQ), and Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA).