The AIAS Honor Awards were developed to publicly recognize outstanding achievements by students, educators, and practitioners who have exhibited an exemplary commitment to the education and development of architecture students. Each year the AIAS honors individuals and groups for their exemplary work in areas such as leadership, collaboration, design, scholarship, and service.
The American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) is pleased to announce a jury with diverse expertise for the 2018 AIAS National Honor Awards. The jury will be chaired by National Vice President, Elizabeth Seidel, AIAS, Assoc. AIA and includes:
Elizabeth Seidel, AIAS, Assoc. AIA
Elizabeth Seidel is the current National Vice President of the American Institute of Architecture Students and sits as the Student Director on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Board of Directors. While working with the ACSA, Elizabeth was engaged with the Education committee where work was done to understand and improve socioeconomic diversity for those engages in architectural education. She participated in the research and composition of a white paper titled: “Moving Towards an Equitable Future 2017-18 Education Committee Report.”
Elizabeth received her Bachelor of Arts Degree from Montana State University and will finish her Masters of Architecture degree next December at her alma mater. There her research focuses on incorporating coping mechanisms into public architecture for people on the autistic spectrum. As seen in her work with the AIAS, Seidel is passionate about empowering peers personally and professionally while leaning into them to be change agents within our industry.
Renée Cheng, FAIA, DPACSA
Renée Cheng, FAIA, DPACSA, Professor, School of Architecture, University of Minnesota; Director, M.S. of Research Practices and Consortium for Research Practices.
Renée is a nationally renowned educator, in 2019, she will change roles and institutions as Dean of the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Cheng pioneered research surrounding the intersection of design and emerging technologies including work on industry adoption of IPD, BIM, and Lean. Her research focuses on collaboration, innovation, and change, especially how they are fostered by equitable and inclusive practices. Her case studies include one of the first studies on IPD for AIA and the extensive, “Motivation and Means: How IPD and Lean Succeed”, co-sponsored by IPDA and LCI. She is active with the American Institute of Architecture, served as the inaugural Chair of the Lean Construction Institute Research Committee and currently serves on the LCI Board of Directors.
Rachel Law, AIAS
As a driven advocate, mentor and designer, Rachel has developed a deep appreciation for the power of architecture and design to activate communities, foster creative thinking, and empower social advocacy.
Rachel received her Bachelor of Architectural Science at Ryerson University, with a focus on innovative practices and human-centred design. After graduation, she served as the 2016-2017 National Vice President of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) in Washington, DC, and the 2016-2017 Student Director of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Through these experiences, Rachel developed and implemented programs to advance leadership, design, and service opportunities throughout architectural education and the profession.
Now at LGA Architectural Partners, the projects that Rachel is currently working on range from residential affordable housing and shelters, university renovations, to restoring and reviving cultural institutions in Toronto.
Nikhil Chaudhuri, AIAS
Nikhil Chaudhuri is an architecture and structural engineering student at Stanford University. Stanford’s architecture program has been an integral part of his college experience, and he hopes that all architecture students are able to have a similarly supportive and inspiring community. He was the Stanford AIAS president last year and is looking forward to leading the chapter again next year. Since moving to the Bay Area for college he has become interested in how architecture can be adapted to address the region’s affordable housing crisis. He was the architect for the Stanford team that won the 2017 Bank of America Low Income Housing Challenge. This summer he is excited to be interning for a modular housing company in Oakland.
Francis E. Lyn,
Francis E. Lyn received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami. He has taught at various Florida institutions in the areas of design, drawing, and architectural theory. His architectural work has received national recognition and has been included in national and international exhibitions. Premiated projects include a new courthouse for Williamsburg Virginia, (in collaboration with Jorge L. Hernandez), as well as the Grand Egyptian Museum and the Graphisoft Conference Center Competitions (in collaboration with Dr. Peter Magyar and Aron Temkin), both of which received recognition from the AIA.
His current research deals with Scandinavian modernism, with a particular focus on the work of Erik Gunnar Asplund. His research also focuses on the importance of both analog and digital methods of representation in the production of architecture. He has presented papers on his research at numerous conferences, both nationally and internationally. Most recently his research has been included as an invited chapter in a text, and has also been published in several scholarly journals. Currently, Professor Lyn is the Junior Phase coordinator for the FAU School of Architecture.
Gregory Laramie, AIA
Gregory Laramie, AIA, is Associate Dean of Roger Williams University School of Architecture, Art and Historic Preservation. He was educated at Rhode Island School of Design, earning the Bachelor of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Architecture degrees. Laramie was the recipient of the 1981 Herbert and Claiborne Pell Medal for Art and Architectural History, and he was a participant in the 1980/81 RISD European Honors Program in Rome.
Laramie has practiced as an architect in Rhode Island since 1983, earning an honor award from AIA Rhode Island. His first project in private practice won a New England Electric System award for Energy Efficient Design, and was built as a demonstration project in Warwick, Rhode Island. Over 30,000 people toured the home in the year that it was open.
He first started teaching at Roger Williams in 1986 as adjunct faculty in Architecture, and became assistant dean in 2011 and promoted to associate dean in 2015. In March of 2018, along with Dean Stephen White, Laramie was awarded the ACSA/AIA Practice and Leadership Award for the innovative Career Investment Program.
Katlyn Montague, AIAS
Katlyn is a recent graduate of Southern Illinois University. She will be continuing her education by getting her Masters in Architecture at Kansas State University starting in the fall. This past year she held the position of Freedom by Design director at Southern Illinois University and served on the National Freedom by Design Advisory Group board. Katlyn has a passion for accessible and Universal Design, which she hope to build my career in architecture around.
Malak Bellajdel, AIAS
Malak is a senior architecture student at the Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA as well as the current vice president of the AIAS chapter, president-elect. She is one of the founders of the freedom by design program in her chapter and loves to use design as a way of serving her community. She is a huge advocate for newly emerging technologies and believes in making design more fun and efficient without forgetting the fundamentals of architecture: program and function. Malak was born in Morocco and started her architectural education in Paris, France before moving to California to embrace new forms of architecture.
Ashley Joseph, AIAS
Ashley Joseph is recent graduate of the B.Arch Program at the New York Institute of Technology-Manhattan Campus. As AIAS Chapter President of the 2017-18 academic year, her focus was on skill building, social interaction, and professional development. As a student, her academic interests were rooted in a sensitivity to historic fabric and building/site heritage to merge those topics to design conditions of today. She is a Designer at Thornton Tomasetti, Inc. in the Historic Preservation Group, where she focuses on design solutions for historic buildings, structures, and materials.
Brigid Callaghan, AIAS
Brigid Callaghan is a designer, building scientist and researcher from Toronto, Canada. She graduated from Kent State University’s Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 2015 before continuing her studies in KSU’s Master of Science in Architecture and Environmental Design. Her passions focus around education, community and innovation. These have lead her to investigate design for service, through the lens of material science, digital fabrication, construction and extreme environments. She has spoken at conferences such as the ARCC Conference: Architecture of Complexity: design, systems, society and environment, and the AIAS Grassroots Leadership Conference: Lead By Example.
Brigid has lived and worked in Florence, Toronto, Southern California, Cleveland, before moving to DC to continue her work with the American Institute of Architecture Students. Currently, she is the Midwest Quadrant Director for AIAS and incoming 2018-2019 AIAS Vice President and ACSA Student Director.
Stephen Vogel, FAIA
Stephen Vogel, FAIA, is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture. He was also Dean of Architecture at the school for 18 years where he co-founded the Detroit Collaborative Design Center, an AIA Whitney M. Young, Jr. Award winner. His practice work focused on urban design, affordable mixed income housing and adaptive reuse/historic preservation. His firm has received over 50 awards for design excellence. He is a National AIA Richard Upjohn and Louise Blanchard Bethune Fellow and Professor Vogel served for two years on the National AIAS Board.
