September 23, 2026 • 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm • Crosby Hall - Room 116 • Virtual option

Julia Czerniak, Dean and professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, is an internationally recognized design thinker. Educated as both an architect and landscape architect, her work explores the cultural, ecological, and urban potentials of landscapes, particularly in deindustrializing cities. Czerniak has authored over 30 publications and participated in over 50 global conferences and events. Previously, she served as Associate Dean at Syracuse's School of Architecture, where she led strategic planning and enhanced diversity initiatives. Czerniak also directed CLEAR, a design practice focused on urban landscapes in Rust Belt cities.

Nina-Marie Lister is a professor in the School of Urban Planning at Toronto Metropolitan University, where she founded and directs the Ecological Design Lab. She is the recipient of Canada's Margolese National Prize for design, a Senior Fellow of Massey College, and has twice served as a visiting professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. A registered professional planner and landscape ecologist, Lister's work connects people to nature in cities. Her federally funded research is widely published and focuses on nature-based infrastructure design for climate resilience, biodiversity, and human well-being. Lister is also the recipient of the Canadian Green Building Council's Excellence and Leadership Award and was named one of Planetizen's Most Influential Urbanists. She has been awarded honorary membership in the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects, and the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects.

Salmaan Craig is a building scientist, architectural educator, and associate professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design, where he is the founding director of gradientLAB. He was previously an assistant professor and then associate professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture and, before that, a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He also spent several years in practice, first as a façade engineer at Buro Happold and later as part of the Specialist Modelling Group at Foster + Partners, contributing to projects including Masdar Institute, Apple Campus, and Bloomberg Headquarters.

Founded in 2026, gradientLAB is a multidisciplinary research center within UCLA’s Architecture and Urban Design Department. The lab explores the relationships between architecture, climate, and cognition. One area of focus is how architecture can perform thermodynamic work through geometry and material physics rather than relying on refrigerants and fossil fuels. Another focus is how architecture can pull people’s cognitive levers, shaping their thermal preferences and wellbeing in a warming world.

Felix Heisel is assistant professor and director of the Circular Construction Lab at Cornell University's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He is a faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and a graduate field member in architecture, systems engineering and design technology. Heisel is a licensed architect in Germany and partner of 2hs Architekten und Ingenieur PartGmbB, an office specializing in the development of circular prototypologies. His scholarship focuses on a systemic redesign of the built environment as a material depot of endless use and reconfiguration. He has received numerous awards for his work and has published several books and articles on the topic, including Building Better—Less—Different: Circular Construction and Circular Economy (Birkhäuser, 2022); Urban Mining und kreislaufgerechtes Bauen (Urban Mining and Circular Construction) (Fraunhofer IRB, 2021); Cultivated Building Materials (Birkhäuser, 2017); and Building from Waste (Birkhäuser, 2014). Heisel graduated from the Berlin University of the Arts and has taught and conducted research at institutions including ETH Zürich, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the Berlage Institute, the Ethiopian Institute of Architecture, Building Construction, and City Development, and the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore.

Karen M’Closkey is professor of landscape architecture and co-founder of the Environmental Modeling Lab (EMLab) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design. She is co-founder, with Keith VanDerSys, of PEG office of landscape + architecture. Their work focuses on the opportunities and limitations made possible by advancements in digital modeling, and on how the assumptions embedded in our methods and tools shape our understanding of landscapes and environments. Their work has been recognized through numerous publications, exhibitions, and awards, including a PEW Fellowship in the Arts. Together, they are the authors/editors of Media Matters in Landscape Architecture (2025) and Dynamic Patterns: Visualizing Landscapes in a Digital Age (2017), and guest editors of LA+ GEO (2020) and LA+ Simulation (2016). Karen currently serves as editor in chief of LA+.

Kiel Moe, FAIA, FAAR, is an architect, author, and forest-building ecologist. He has taught at more than a dozen schools of architecture in the United States and internationally. He is the author of 10 books on the energetic and material basis of architecture, including Unless: The Construction Ecology of Seagram Building and, most recently, Forest-First Timber Building (2026). In recognition of his design and research, he has received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Helsinki, the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize, and the Architecture League of New York Prize, and was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Erkin Özay, chair and associate professor in the Department of Architecture, is a registered architect and award-winning educator. Özay is interested in the roles of urban institutions and the multiplicity of city-making practices. He investigates how institutional settings and urban interventions can serve as shelters from the structural inequities that burden the lives of vulnerable urban communities. Özay is the author of several publications, most recently including the book Urban Renewal and School Reform in Baltimore: Rethinking the 21st Century Public School, which bridges facets of urban design, development, and education policy in its examination of the East Baltimore Redevelopment Initiative, one of the most aggressive urban renewal initiatives in recent American history, resulting in the displacement of hundreds of predominantly Black households. Özay's teaching focuses on contemporary challenges of housing and urban revitalization in weak market cities. He seeks to expose students to the multifaceted nature of urban practices, beyond traditional and prescriptive models. He has served as a panelist and speaker on several AIA events on school design, urban design education, and community-based practice. Özay is also a recipient of the AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education award.

Kristine Stiphany is a licensed architect and an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo. Stiphany is a built environment ethnographer of contemporary Brazil and the United States whose research examines the sociotechnical dimensions of nonformal housing environments, everyday infrastructures and adaptive economies. She is particularly interested in participatory methods, data transitions and citizen-led development. Her recent project, SPARKS! Oasis, received a Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects. She is co-editor of Insurgent Urbanisms in the Americas. Stiphany has received a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of São Paulo Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, as well as fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the Andrea von Braun Foundation for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her current research on collective housing and land development in the United States is supported by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

Charles Waldheim is an American-Canadian architect and urbanist based in New York City and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he directs the Office for Urbanization and hosts the podcast Future of the American City. He also serves as the Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, where he convenes the Larger Landscape Conversation. Waldheim's research examines relationships among landscape, ecology and contemporary urbanism. He is the author or editor of 16 books on these topics, including Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory, The Landscape Urbanism Reader and Technical Lands: A Critical Primer. His research and creative practice have received awards from the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. His honors include the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan and the Cullinan Chair at Rice University.