Student News
Carnegie Mellon Architecture is proud to showcase the work and accolades of our students. Submit news here.
August
August 26, 2025: A team of graduate students is selected as one of two finalist teams in a field of over 40 international entries in a student modeling competition for the Building Simulation 2025 conference, the biennial global meeting of the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA), held in Brisbane, Australia, August 24-27. The team is composed of MSBPD ’26 students Leo Ma, Jiwon Kim and Mackenzie Wilhelm, along with MSSD ’26 student Yuqing Huang and PhD-BPD student Minghao Xu. The project's foundation was established in the students’ "Building Performance Simulation" spring 2025 course, after which the team dedicated an additional month to refine their work for the competition. Team members Kim, Ma and Wilhelm traveled to Brisbane to represent the team in the final round of the competition, delivering an excellent oral presentation.
Teodor Mlynczyk (MAAD ’26) and Kritika Sarawagi (M.Arch ’26), with faculty instructor/advisor Assistant Teaching Professor Jongwan Kwon, are awarded 3rd place in the "Material Research" category of ACSA’s 2025 Design for Freedom Competition for their project "Unbuild to Rebuild." Ishika Dinesh (B.Arch ’27) and Cara Feng (B.Arch ’27), with faculty instructor/advisor Kwon, receive Honorable Mention for their project "Nomadic Walls – Circular Construction System with Low-Carbon, Site Ready Wall Panels," also in the “Material Research” category. The competition is organized by Grace Farms Foundation’s Design for Freedom movement, in collaboration with the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), to recognize 10 exceptional projects that explore how architects can work to eradicate forced and child labor from the built environment. Read the press release.
September
September 9, 2025: PhD-Arch candidate Morgan Newman successfully completes and presents her Ph.D. proposal titled, "[Re]constructions of Black Life: Toward an Architectural Praxis of 'Wake Work' in the Black Belt." Morgan's committee comprises Associate Professor Nida Rehman (Advisor & Chair), Assistant Professor Vernelle A. A. Noel (School of Architecture), Dr. Edda Fields Black (CMU Department of History) and Dr. Samaneh Moafi (Forensic Architecture). Kai Gutschow serves as an observer for the presentation. Morgan now embarks on her fieldwork and dissertation writing.
September 17, 2025: PhD-Arch student Ifrah Asif is awarded the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy’s John G. Thorpe Emerging Professionals and Students Fellowship to attend the annual conference "The Individual and the Spirit of Innovation" taking place in Pittsburgh from September 17-20, 2025.
September 23, 2025: Julia Hu (B.A. ’27) and Russell Tsai (B.Arch ’28) with faculty instructor/advisor Assistant Teaching Professor Jongwan Kwon win the 2025 AIA COTE® Top Ten for Students Competition for the project "De-Clustered, Environmental Middle School in Pittsburgh’s Inner Fringe." The project was completed in the second year studio "48-200 – Poiesis Studio III: Architecture Biome and Climate" coordinated by Laura Garófalo. View the press release.
The "Smart Sidewalk Guide," a continuation of the "Smart Surfaces Guide," is published. This resource highlights how sidewalk investments can address urban heat, flooding and the integration of EV charging infrastructure. It introduces a Smart Sidewalk Taxonomy to guide policymakers in aligning mobility, sustainability and resilience goals. The guide is authored by PhD-BPD candidate Suzy Li and University Professor Vivian Loftness, with contributions from research assistants Sakshi Aparajit (MUD '25), Fangyu Huang (MUD '24), Laura Lasariia (MSSD '24), Shreya Mathur (MUD '24), Xuan Peng (MUD '25), Manya Sharma (MSSD '25) and Xinyue Zhang (MUD '24). The project is supported by the Leon Group and the Smart Surfaces Coalition.
September 25, 2025: Students Jason Asiedu (B.Arch ’27), Hazel Buonopane (B.Arch ’28), Emma Dana (B.Arch ’28), Hazel Froling (B.Arch ’26) and Sydney Mansavage (B.Arch ’27) participate in the Bethel Woods Art and Architecture Festival at the historic site of Woodstock, curated by Special Faculty Neal Lucas Hitch. The festival brings together international student and faculty teams from universities including Princeton, Cornell, Syracuse, UCLA, Rice and CMU for four days of experimental making. Their work is featured in "The Architect's Newspaper."
November
November 17, 2025: Drawings by Nicholas Thies (M.Arch '26) and Sharvi Shah (M.Arch '26) are featured in the publication after school accompanying the exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art, co-curated by Special Faculty Theodossis (Theo) Issaias. The exhibition and publication feature work and essays by various school faculty.
-
January
January 30, 2025: PhD-BPD candidate Guanzhou Ji successfully defends his PhD dissertation, “Capturing, Editing, and Relighting Indoor Scenes from a Single Panorama.” His advisory committee is comprised of Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer (co-chair), Professor Srinivasa Narasimhan (co-chair, School of Computer Science Robotics Institute), Professor Susan Finger (Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Sing Bing Kang (Zillow Group).February
February 3, 2025: PhD-Arch student Ifrah Asif is featured on UPenn’s Weitzman School of Design’s social media (Instagram & LinkedIn) as part of Women of Weitzman, a series that celebrates the contributions of female faculty and recent alums to the built environment and the arts. The feature highlights her work in historic preservation and climate resiliency, and recent graduate internship at the Getty Conservation Institute.March
March 24, 2025: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer is featured in a CMU News story about faculty research using AI in energy applications, as part of CMU Energy Week. Sawyer received a seed grant from the Scott Institute with her PhD student Tian Li for work to address the need to reduce carbon emissions and energy use in buildings across the country, then identify ambitious and achievable decarbonization targets. With PhD student Niloofar Nikookar, she develops AI-driven dynamic lighting systems to optimize energy efficiency and user comfort.March 26, 2025: PhD-AECM student Waku Ken-Opurum receives an award to pursue the prototype development of passive biomimetic biodegradable air filters to improve indoor air quality and, by extension, mitigate health risks associated with air pollution. This lays the groundwork for eventually deploying a more sustainable alternative to traditional filters for HVAC systems, which are discarded every 3-6 months. CMU's Scott Institute for Energy Innovation’s new entrepreneurship award seeks to grow the University's energy and climate startup community and to make it easier to translate CMU cleantech innovations from research to the market.
April
April 7, 2025: PhD-AECM candidate Shalini Priyadarshini presents and successfully passes her PhD proposal, "SETU – Safety in Excavation and Trenching for yoU: A training and decision making for worker safety in excavation and trenching operations in construction." Her committee is comprised of Associate Professor Erica Cochran Hameen, PhD, Assoc. AIA, NOMA, LEED AP; Burcu Akinci, PhD (Civil and Environmental Engineering); John Mendeloff, PhD (RAND Corporation, University of Pittsburgh); and Shailendra Singh, PhD, MBA, CHMM (University of Florida). Shalini will now begin the PhD defense preparation phase for her dissertation.April 21, 2025: PhD-BPD students Jinzhao Tian and Haipei Bie are undertaking deep data analytics work this summer through September 30 dedicated to finalizing work on Indoor Air Quality and healthy workplaces for the General Services Administration (GSA). The work builds upon background research conducted by MSBPD students this spring.
May
May 28, 2025: PhD-BPD candidate Niloofar Nikookar presents and successfully passes her PhD proposal defense, "Affective Atmospheres: An Interactive Lighting System to Enhance Emotional Experience in Indoor Spaces." Her dissertation explores the intersection of design, technology and human emotion, offering new perspectives on how architectural environments can impact well-being. Her committee is comprised of Assistant Professor Azadeh O. Sawyer, PhD, LEED AP (Chair); Motahhare Eslami, PhD (Human-Computer Interaction Institute, CMU); Mayank Goel, PhD (Human-Computer Interaction Institute, CMU); and Siobhan Rockcastle, PhD (School of Architecture & Environment, University of Oregon). Niloofar will now begin the PhD defense preparation phase for her dissertation.July
July 5, 2025: Claire Laux (M.Arch '25) is selected as one of five recipients for the Steven Myron Holl Foundation / 'T' Space Summer Architectural Residency, titled "Sublimity." The 25-day intensive studio invites participants to think and design critically, exploring theoretical and experimental approaches to architectural design for a site-specific project. -
March
March 1, 2024: A Carnegie Mellon team comprised of Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer, University Professor Vivian Loftness, CEE Professor Pingbo Tang, architecture graduate students Tian Li, Tianqi Liu and Jiarong Xie, and Tepper MBA student Yi Lu, publish a study in the journal “Development in The Built Environment” (IF: 8.2). The study, “Generalized building energy and carbon emissions benchmarking with post-prediction analysis,” proposes a tool that can be applied to any contiguous U.S. cities by AI techniques.March 8, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee travels to Kochi, India to launch a new design trophy for the National Association of Students of Architecture (NASA, India) focused on “Reimagining India’s Everyday Modernism through Adaptive Reuse.” Assistant Teaching Professor Sarosh Anklesaria and Lee created the call and form a jury including Liliane Wong, Bie Plevoets, Adjunct Faculty Nazia Tarannum, and others. MSAECM student Tarun Krishna, former President of NASA, invites Lee to present the trophy launch and a talk on his forthcoming book, “Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures,” with PhD-AECM student Joseph Murray.
March 22, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents her working paper, “Embodied Ecological Histories: The Significance of the Environment in the Archive of Slavery,” at the “Divergent Environmentalism” workshop hosted by the University of Pennsylvania Department of History. She shares progress on her paper, which she will present on a panel at the World Congress of Environmental Historians in Oulu, Finland in August.
April
April 1, 2024: Architecture PhD students Tian Li and Haipei Bie, Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer, University Professor Vivian Loftness, and Tepper MBA student Yi Lu publish “MEBA: AI-powered precise building monthly energy benchmarking approach,” in the top building science journal “Applied Energy” (IF: 11.2) in “Special Issue: AI in Low Carbon Emissions.”April 5, 2024: University Professor Vivian Loftness and PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li receive a $100,000 gift agreement from China Leon Company to support their research on smart surfaces and sidewalks and publishing the “Smart Sidewalks Guidebook.”
PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li receives a $1,500 Travel Award from the Steinbrenner Institute for Environmental Education and Research to present her work at the Esri Geodesign Summit in the summer.
Second-year undergraduate student Christian Duckworth is awarded a $5,000 fellowship from CMU’s Community-Based Research-to-Practice Program. Working closely with Professor Steve Lee and Pittsburgh City Council members Deb Gross and Anthony Coghill, he plans to use the funding to design, prototype and test portable housing solutions that meet the performance criteria of Bill 2023-2197 and key constituencies in the city.
April 18, 2024: PhD-BPD candidate and instructor Suzy Li wins the 2024 Graduate Student Teaching Award during CMU’s annual Celebration of Education Awards ceremony. The committee is impressed by her nomination, including her commitment to students’ learning.
April 28, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and PhD-BPD student Niloofar Nikookar publish “Investigating the Impact of Combined Daylight and Electric Light on Human Perception of Indoor Space” in the “Journal of Sustainability” with co-authors Mayank Goel and Siobhan Rockcastle.
April 29, 2024: A team of students in the Computational Design program – Felicia Luo, Isaac Martinotti and David Troetschel – along with CodeLab visiting scholar Federica Joe Gardella, deliver their paper, “A Multi-scalar and Multi-modal Approach to Architectural Heritage Documentation: An Interactive Digital Representation of the St. Nicholas Chapel,” at the Heri-Tech conference in Florence, Italy. The team is directed by Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach.
May
May 9, 2024: PhD-CD candidate and Graduate Instructor Jinmo Rhee successfully defends his PhD dissertation, “Computational Methods for the Identification and Comparative Analysis of Urban Form Types: A Case Study of Rust Belt Cities.” His advisory committee is comprised of Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach (chair), Professor Emeritus Ramesh Krishnamurti and Professor Bhiksha Raj Ramakrishnan (Computer Science Department).May 18, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee co-moderates the session “Exploring the Future of Design: Navigating AI and Emerging Technologies” with Katrina Kelly-Pitou (SmithGroup) at Build Pittsburgh. The session also features presentations by panelists Tian Li (PhD-BPD ’24), Alex Wing (Stantec) and Jacob Morrison (Cannon Design).
May 19, 2024: Associate Teaching Professor Joshua D. Lee and PhD-AECM student Joseph Murray host the Council on Open Building's annual meeting May 18-19 in the Intelligent Workplace. The event features training in scenario planning and a thought-provoking presentation by Yujin Wu (MSCD ’25) on the “Use of Machine Learning in Capacity Analysis,” a research project she worked on with Rishab Umarani (MSAECM ’24) under Prof. Lee during the spring semester.
May 20, 2024: Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and PhD-BPD student Niloofar Nikookar publish “Designing for Daylight: An Exploration of Origami-Inspired Interior Shading Screens” in the conference proceedings of the “Annual Modeling and Simulation Conference (ANNSIM),” held May 20-23, 2024 in Washington, DC.
May 21, 2024: Tai Le Anh (M.Arch '26) receives an award for the Re-draw Villa Savoye competition organized by Non-A for his drawing "Villa Savoye Sections."
June
June 28, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents a poster entitled “(Re)Spatializing the Past to Inform Just Future: How the Plantation is Replicated in Black Belt Towns” at the 14th International Space Syntax Symposium June 24-28 in Nicosia, Cyprus.August
August 21, 2024: PhD-CD candidate Yuning Wu successfully defends her PhD dissertation, “A Human-Centered Reinforcement Learning Driven Robotic Framework for Assisting Construction Workers.” Her advisory committee is comprised of Associate Professor Daniel Cardoso Llach (advisor), Dr. Jean Oh (Co-advisor) (Robotics Institute), and Dr. Jieliang (Rodger) Luo (Autodesk Research, AI Lab).August 23, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman presents the paper “Beyond the Archive: Using Placed Ecological Histories to Explore Black Environmental Relations” at The World Congress of Environmental History August 19-23 in Oulu, Finland.
September
September 6, 2024: PhD-Arch student Morgan Newman completes a six-week research placement over the summer at Forensic Architecture, London, UK, where she worked on two research projects and gave a talk to the organization about her dissertation research.November
November 14-16, 2024: Thesis work by MSSD students, guided by Track Chair and Professor Dana Cupkova, is presented at the ACADIA 2024 Conference "Designing Change" held at the Calgary School of Architecture and Banff Centre for the Arts. Presentations include: "Shaping Passive Dehumidification of Materials for Humid Climates: Computational Approach to Integrating Isothermal Membrane-Assisted Dehumidification (IMAD)" by N. Bhusry, D. Cupkova, and A. Sawyer; "Mapping Regenerative Coastal Morphologies through Hybridized Simulation Frameworks" by M. Roy, D. Cupkova, and C. Mondor; and "MycoFlame: In Care of Forest Biomes and Wildfire Resiliency" by J. Berenblum, N. Bhusry, R. George, and D. Cupkova (awarded the ACADIA 2024 Best Project Runner-Up).December
December 2, 2024: With support from a Scott Institute seed grant, principal investigator Assistant Professor Azadeh Sawyer and her former student Tian Li (PhD-BPD ’24) are developing an optimization model for AI-driven benchmarking that accurately predicts a building’s energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions at daily, weekly and yearly intervals.