Vernelle A. A. Noel
Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is the Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor in Architecture at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. She is a computational design scholar, architect, artist and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab (SitCoDe Lab). She investigates relationships between knowledge, computational systems, and society through creative practices by building new concepts, frameworks, methodologies, and tools to explore creative, embodied, sociocultural and political aspects of computing for new reconfigurations of practice, pedagogy and publics.
Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and ideas2innovation (i2i), among others. She is a recipient of the DigitalFUTURES Young Award for exceptional research and scholarship in the field of critical computational design. She has a TEDx Talk titled "The Power of Making: Craft, Computation, and Carnival" and served as Art Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2026. She is co-editor of the book "Critical Computational Relations in Design, Architecture and the Built Environment" with Dr. Yana Boeva. Dr. Noel has held positions at Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Stuttgart, the University of Florida, Penn State University, MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and she has practiced in the U.S., India, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Affiliations
News
April 25, 2026: Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel presents the paper "From Photo to Fabrication (Photo2Fab)" at CAADRIA 2026, co-authored with Karthick Bangaru Giridharan (MSCD '26) and Shahzadi Padda (B.Arch '26), with contributions from Tvisha Arora (B.Arch '27), Mahika Singh (B.Arch '27), Starr Wasler (B.Arch '26, MSRSD '27) and Brian Zhang.
February 18, 2026: Vernelle A. A. Noel, Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor in Architecture, is promoted to Associate Professor without indefinite tenure.
October 1, 2025: Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel is named Art Papers Chair for SIGGRAPH 2026. SIGGRAPH is one of the premier conferences for computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Fall 2025 Teaching
With the notion of “critical technical practice” as a touchstone, this graduate-level seminar draws from across design, media, and science and technology studies to cultivate an awareness of the discursive and political dimensions of technology in design, and to guide participants in the formulation of a graduate thesis in computational design.
This graduate-level course examines the emergence of computation as a pivotal concept in contemporary architecture and design through a selection of design theories and practices responding to the so-called “computer revolution.”
Spring 2025 Teaching
Addressing conceptual and practical aspects of the relationship between computation and design, this course explores the fundamentals of generative and rule-based systems for designing and making, along with basic approaches to creative data processing, visualization and materialization using low and high-tech approaches.
Fulfills minor requirements for: Computational Design
This interdisciplinary course investigates the intersections of computing, cognition, and syntax through the visual-perceptual, rule-based approach of shape grammars.