May 16, 2019 -- The School of Architecture is pleased to announce the appointments of four new tenure track faculty for the 2019-2020 academic year. J. Yolande Daniels, Aroussiak Gabrielian, and Dr. Bhavna Sharma will begin their appointments as assistant professors of architecture on August 15, 2019. Dr. Sascha Delz will begin his appointment as assistant professor of architecture on January 1, 2020.

J. Yolande Daniels is a co-founding design principal of studioSUMO in New York. She is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture, as well as a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and of the Independent Study Program of the Whitney American Museum of Art in studio practice and cultural studies. She holds a master of architecture from Columbia University and a bachelor of science in environmental science from the City University of New York. The work of studioSUMO ranges from institutional and cultural projects in education and the arts to housing, to research-oriented installations and exhibitions. Daniels is currently the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University and a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught architecture at the graduate level at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Pratt Institute, and City College, and was interim director of the master of architecture program at Parsons School of Constructed Environments.

Dr. Sascha Delz is an architect and researcher working at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and urban studies. He holds a master’s degree in architecture and a doctor of science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) Zurich. His research focuses on how specific political-economic frameworks influence the manifestation of architecture, urban form, and living environments. Sascha has worked as design instructor and researcher at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich and the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore. He was most recently a postdoctoral fellow and coordinator of ETH Zurich’s newly established doctoral program in landscape & urban studies. He is the author of the forthcoming book Entanglements of Development - Urban Transformation and International Cooperation in Ethiopia, and the co-author of the forthcoming publication Housing the Co-op - A Micro-Political Manifesto.

Aroussiak Gabrielian is a scholar-practitioner working across the fields of landscape architecture and media arts. She is a co-founder and design director of foreground design agency, a critical landscape practice. Gabrielian holds a dual master’s in architecture and landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Ph.D. candidate in the Media Arts + Practice program at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she has been an Annenberg Fellow since 2014. Gabrielian’s work on alternative environmental futures has received awards including the Tomorrowland Projects Foundation Award administered through the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Word Changing Ideas Awards recognized by Fast Company, and the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. She is currently working on a book manuscript emerging from her Ph.D. dissertation, Encounters with the Anthropocene: Synthetic Geologies, Diegetic Ecologies, and Other Landscape Imaginaries.

Dr. Bhavna Sharma joins us from the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at the University of Bath, where she has been an assistant professor since 2016. She received a B.S. in architecture and M.A. in art history from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an M.S. in civil & environmental engineering at the University of Hawaii, and a Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Pittsburgh where she was also a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellow. Her research centers on improving the design, construction, and sustainability of the built environment through better use of natural materials. She uses an interdisciplinary, multi-scale approach to investigate and develop natural materials (with a focus on bamboo) for structural applications. Sharma has developed an international research profile on bamboo for construction and has lectured and published widely on the topic. She recently completed the second edition of her book, Nonconventional and Vernacular Construction Materials.