Faculty appointments

The Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture is thrilled to welcome two tenure-track, one teaching-track and two visiting faculty this fall. 

Juney Lee, PhD joins as T. David Fitz-Gibbon Assistant Professor of Architecture.

He is deeply inspired by the creative roles that architecture and structural design can play in alleviating the impending environmental and social crises throughout the world. He is particularly interested in how more intelligently shaped and constructed structures can dramatically reduce the embodied energy of buildings, minimize construction waste and empower new materials. His transdisciplinary research aspirations across computational structural design, regenerative materials and sustainable construction methods are united by an effort to accelerate the decarbonization of the building industry through advancements of emerging construction technologies that are scalable, affordable and accessible to a wide range of environmental and socioeconomic contexts. At CMU, Juney leads the teaching of the core structural design curriculum, as well as integrated design studios and advanced computational structural design electives. In addition to teaching, he also advises student research and thesis work across all academic levels within Carnegie Mellon Architecture and beyond. He is passionate about developing hands-on, engaging and immersive methods of teaching and learning structural design that are focused on enhancing design intuition and sensibility of students, which are increasingly more important and necessary human skills in light of rapidly evolving generative AI-based design tools.

Search Committee: Joshua Lee (Chair), Jeremy Ficca, Susan Finger, Kristen Kurland, Azadeh Sawyer

Vernelle A. A. Noel, PhD joins as the Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant Professor in Architecture and Urban Design.

Vernelle is a computational design scholar, architect, artist and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. She investigates traditional and digital practices and their intersections with society. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she builds new frameworks, methodologies and tools to explore social, cultural and political aspects of computation and emerging technologies 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 gave a TEDx Talk titled “The Power of Making: Craft, Computation, and Carnival.”

Vernelle holds a Ph.D. from The Pennsylvania State University, a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from MIT, a Bachelor of Architecture from Howard University and a Diploma in Civil Engineering from Trinidad & Tobago. She has practiced as an architect in the U.S., India and Trinidad & Tobago.

Search Committee: Daniel Cardoso Llach (Chair), Daragh Byrne, Laura Garófalo, Golan Levin, Francesca Torello

Jongwan Kwon joins as an Assistant Teaching Professor.

Jongwan is an architectural designer and educator. His research, teaching and professional practice examine the intersections of material culture and infrastructure with a focus on regional sustainability. Before joining CMU, he held academic appointments at Kansas State University as an assistant professor (2021–23) and at RISD (2017–21), where he served as the graduate studio coordinator and was nominated for the Frazier Teaching Award. He was the recipient of the SOM Prize and MIT Architecture Teaching Fellowship (2016-17), and his work and writing have been published in journals such as Pidgin, Lunch, Room One Thousand, On Site and others.

Jongwan received his Master of Architecture and a Certificate in Urban Design from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from Hanyang University with a Summa Cum Laude and Thesis Prize. He gained professional experience in Boston, New York, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

Review Committee: Omar Khan, Mary-Lou Arscott, Joshua Bard, Kai Gutschow, Erica Cochran Hameen

Misri Patel joins as 2023–25 Ann Kalla Visiting Professor.

Misri is an architect and researcher from Mumbai, India. Her pedagogical interests focus on material systems, computational design, additive manufacturing and traditional-advanced fabrication methods. In 2019, she received the Ballard Fellowship at Lawrence Technological University and served as a Research Lead at Taubman College on Long Range Glass, which won the R+D Award by Architect Magazine in 2022. Her work has been published in Unfolded, Portico, ideasforward-24H, ACSA, Acadia Conference Proceedings and exhibited at the Venice Biennale, DigitalFUTURES conference and the Center for Architecture, New York. Prior to joining CMU, she served as a Visiting Lecturer at the Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania and Visiting Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

She received a Bachelor of Architecture from NMIMS BSSA in Mumbai and a Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies from Taubman College, University of Michigan. Prior to her teaching appointments, she gained professional experience at the offices of Sameep Padora, Mumbai, and LOT-EK, New York, and shadowed at Perkins and Will, Los Angeles.

Search Committee: Omar Khan (Chair), Mary-Lou Arscott, Priyanka Bista, Gerard Damiani, Jonathan Kline

Tuliza Sindi joins as 2023–25 Ann Kalla Visiting Professor.

Tuliza is an architecture educator, researcher and practitioner based between the U.S. and South Africa. She founded the masters design-research studio Unit 19 (2020-22) at the University of Johannesburg’s Graduate School of Architecture (GSA). Tuliza retires design approaches to ‘land’, to work with the ‘ground’ as a calendar and architecture as its metronome within the framework of chronopolitics and property regimes. In 2022, she co-founded cross-disciplinary architecture collective room19isaFactory. with three Unit 19 graduates. Through what they call the practice of ‘Quiet Architecture’ (with ‘Quiet’ as defined by Prof. Tina Campt in her 2017 book, Listening to Images, referring to the practice of performing the future now), the collective speculates about liberating the ground from chronopolitical captivity through myth- and culture-making, toward deriving alternate spatial futures.

Search Committee: Omar Khan (Chair), Mary-Lou Arscott, Priyanka Bista, Gerard Damiani, Jonathan Kline

Faculty updates
Sarosh Anklesaria has been promoted to Assistant Teaching Professor.
Vicki Achnani will return in a new role as Associate Studio Professor.
Theodossis Issaias will return as Special Faculty.