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The 10th registered architect in Florida, he opened his own firm in 1911, and in 1915 opened a second office in Palm Beach. Known for Mediterranean Revival Style.

Germane Barnes’ research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Community Housing Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University Of Miami School Of Architecture. He is the 2021 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize winner, Rome Prize Fellow and winner of the Architectural League Prize. His design and research contributions have been published and exhibited in several international institutions. Most notably, The Museum of Modern Art, Pin-Up Magazine, The Graham Foundation, The New York Times, Architect Magazine, DesignMIAMI/ Art Basel, The Swiss Institute, Metropolis Magazine, Curbed, and The National Museum of African American History where he was identified as one of the future designers on the rise.

Roberto Behar has been a Professor in Practice at the University of Miami School of Architecture since 1986. He is a principal founder of R & R Studios, the collaborative office he shares with Rosario Marquardt. R&R Studios is a multidisciplinary practice weaving together visual arts, architecture, design and the city. Behar frequently lectures in the United States, Europe, Israel, and South America, and his work has been published in over 200 publications worldwide. Behar's work has been presented in galleries, museums, and events in America and abroad. Exhibitions venues include solo and group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, the Miami Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art at the Madison, Miami International Airport, The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art, the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, the Centre International pour la Ville, I’Architecture, et le Paysage (CIVA) in Brussels and the Institute Francais d’ Architecture in Paris, as well as Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

He was the Director of the Architectural Club of Miami from ADD DATES Cultural Director of the Centro de Arquitectos de Rosario.

Behar has a Diploma of Architecture from the Universidad Nacional de Rosario in Argentina, and later studied at The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City.

Professor Charles Bohl is the founding director of the graduate program in Real Estate Development and Urbanism (MRED+U) at the University of Miami’s School of Architecture, where he previously directed the interdisciplinary Knight Program in Community Building from 2000-2008.
Dr. Bohl is an expert on place making, mixed-use development and the public process for planing and community design. He is the author of Place Making: Developing Town Centers, Main Streets and Urban Villages, a best-selling book published by the Urban Land Institute. He co-edited (w/ Jean-Francois Lejuene) the book Sitte, Hegemann, And The Metropolis: Modern Civic Art And International Exchanges (Routledge).
Research and academic programs carried out by Dr. Bohl have been supported by more than $4.2 million provided by major foundations including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, and the Urban Land Institute.
Dr. Bohl serves on the Governance Committee of the 1000-member ULI Southeast Florida/Caribbean District Council, where he previously served as Chair (2015-17). He also served as Chair of the Florida Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism from 2010-2012 and currently serves on the board. Dr. Bohl was elected by the faculty to serve as Speaker of the School of Architecture Council for three successive terms (2017-2020) and currently serves as Deputy Speaker.
Prior to joining the University of Miami Professor Bohl was a Senior Research Associate at the University of North Carolina’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies, where he established the Smart Growth and the New Economy Program and served as the Senior Fellow for the Weiss Urban Livability Program. Dr. Bohl holds a doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
He lectures and consults widely on mixed-use development, place making and community building in the U.S. and abroad.

Jacob Brillhart’s research engages the creative search through drawing, painting and design. This ongoing curiosity focuses on the ever changing relationship between design and methods of representation and visualization. His scholarly investigation of the creative search is based on Le Corbusier’s travel drawings and into his architectural theories and built work. He teaches drawing courses in the Rome program, seminars on Le Corbusier and Theory of Architecture and the Environment, plus core and upper level research studios. This scholarly study influences his own built work through his office Jacob Brillhart Architect, P.A., which seeks to establish a dynamic building vocabulary drawn from place, culture and climate. As a licensed architect and LEED AP, Brillhart is also engaged in sustainable building practices and was honored with the 2009 AIA Miami Design Merit Award for his “Mechanical House” and 2010 AIA Design Excellence Award for the “Grass House”. In 2010, he was also nominated as a finalist for the Rome Prize in Architecture.

An architect and an artist, Rocco Ceo teaches courses in design, Design/Build (with Jim Adamson), foundation courses in freehand and mechanical drawing, drawing seminars on color theory, Michelangelo, Historic American Building Survey/HABS and Historic American Landscape Survey/HALS. He has produced drawings of the elements of Florida’s landscapes as well as the documentation of seminal sites in the history of South Florida such as Vizcaya and the Marjory Stoneman Douglas home. His published work includes the award winning books, Redland: A Preservation and Tourism Plan done with Margot Ammidown and Maria Nardi and Historic Landscapes of Florida co-authored with Joanna Lombard. His architecture practice focuses on the unique relationship between architecture and landscape found in the American Tropics. His work has received awards from the Florida Trust for Historic Preservation, Progressive Architecture, and I.D. Magazine and the Miami Chapter of AIA. His interest in paradox found in the study of the natural world informs his architecture, research and painting.

Sonia Chao writes and teaches in the area of sustainable architecture and urbanism, resilient design, and historic preservation in the subtropics. Her scholarship explores the intersection between historic preservation, historic places, and resilient design. Across the years, Chao has received numerous grants from public agencies, private foundations, and non-profits, as well as contracts from regional and local governments.
Chao’s current research, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), studies the connections between a city’s built and social layers. The aim is to produce new meta-models, through a human-centered framework, to inform anticipatory guidelines for resilient urban and community design of coastal cities.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Andrew (1992), Chao became the founding director for the University of Miami School of Architecture’s Center for Urban & Community Design and Chao has served as its director since 2006. Under her leadership, the Center has generated investigations, publications, exhibitions, symposia, and partnerships with communities, to promote sustainable and resilient design practices worldwide. Chao has also re-aligned the Center’s core values, encouraging the design of buildings and communities that are environmentally responsible, socially equitable, and economically viable.
Recently, in the wake of severe hurricanes in the Caribbean, Chao, her colleague, engineering professor Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos and a recent alumna, Gaby Feito, continued an effort to assist communities to rebuild in a resilient manner by creating a digitally available ‘user-friendly’ shipping container housing building design kit.
This year, Chao joined UM’s Institute for the Advanced Studies of the Americas, as it’s ‘Climate & the Environment’ Faculty Research Fellow. With Geography colleagues, Chao also helped create the new interdisciplinary Master of Professional Science in Urban Sustainability & Resilience program, which she co-directs, and that will launch in the fall of 2020.
Chao became a Principal Investigator on a team of professors, who in 2018 received a University of Miami U-LINK grant, to analyze and quantify the capacity of coral reefs to protect urban centers from storm surge, utilizing Miami Beach as a test site. In the same year, she also received a grant from Dade Heritage Trust to produce a Resilience + Preservation Toolkit, intended for community-wide dissemination in the City of Miami.
In 2006, Chao chaired the first UM symposium addressing urban sustainability, and since then she has focused her research and capacity-building efforts in the area, leading to endeavors in South Florida, Haiti, Mexico, Dominican Republic, and Cuba. Her related National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funded publication (2016) is entitled Under the Sun: Traditions & Innovations in Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism in the Sub-Tropics.
Since 2002, Chao has also focused on Havana’s sustainably-minded urban codes, balancing the evolution of urban form with the regulations of historical centers. Her correlated funded endeavors include interdisciplinary investigations, publications, lectures, and international exhibitions, alongside scholars from both sides of the Florida Straits. Most recently, she guest curated the Havana 500 exhibition and chaired an associated symposium at UM.
Before entering the academy, Chao practiced architecture in New York City with Robert A.M. Stern and with Kohn Pederson Fox. In Venice, Italy, she practiced with Alberto Cechetto and with Studio Mar, in collaboration with Architetti Vittorio Gregotti. She received a Master’s of Science in Architecture/Building Design Theory from Columbia University and a Bachelor in Architecture from the University of Miami.

Completing his Masters in Architecture at the University of Toronto in 2014, Chris draws from his education, experience and interests in Design, Computer Science, Digital Fabrication, and Physical Computing to help develop and manage RAD-UM, a research lab dedicated for project-based research on the spatial ramifications of embedded technology and ubiquitous computing. Located at the University of Miami's School of Architecture, RAD’s research is premised on the notion that every building or landscape component can be equipped with computational power. Over the last several years, Chris has overseen the growth of RAD-UM and its projects like Cof-e-Bar, Bio-Display, Zenciti, and Robotic Cloud. His interests lie in bridging the digital and the physical realms within the public arena, particularly in ways that can create new and exciting social interactions.

Jaime Correa is an Associate Professor in Practice and the former Director of the Master in Urban Design at the School of Architecture of the University of Miami (position held from 1996 to 2014) where he was also the Knight Professor in Community Building.
He is one among the 14 architects and town planners that launched the American New Urbanism movement, one of its most important promoters in Latin America, and also one of its most significant critics. From 2013-2017 he has served as a Climate Reality Mentor under the tutelage of former Vice-President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore. His professional firm is engaged in a new type of urban design practice focusing on social innovations, bottom-up urbanism, the creation of real estate value through morphogenetic disruptions, generative codes, self-organization and its interconnection with structured and unstructured information. His projects explore: incremental master planning, super-graphics and the physical representation of information in urban areas, informal urbanism, morphogenesis, colossal refugee camps, tiny gap-housing, self-organizing redevelopment, public space design, big data mining, the Internet of Things, and sea-level-rise adaptation and evacuation.
He has been the recipient of the Faculty of the Year Award at the Master in Real Estate Development, the Wooddrow W. Wilkins Award for Outstanding Teaching and the University of Miami Excellence in Civic Engagement Award. He received the bi-annual 2014 Charles A. Barrett Memorial Award, the Florida AIA Urban Designer and Academic of the Year Award, three John Nolen Awards (in collaboration with the Treasure Coast Regional Planning, the University of Miami, and the City of Delray Beach), the Public Works Association Project of the Year (APAW), the 2014 Florida Redevelopment Association’s Presidents Award, the Florida Governor’s Point of Light Award, first prize at the Salt Lake City Interrotta competition, four national CNU urban design awards for his master plan collaborations, an Honorable Mention at the Williamsburg competition, and many more awards and recognitions.
He is the author of numerous academic articles and book chapters, founding Chair of Academic Papers for the Congress for the New Urbanism, member of the Board of Editors of Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo, in Mexico, and a Blog writer for Facebook’s “Informal-Urbanism” page. His books include a parody of the New Urbanism (Seven Recipes for the New Urbanism), a small pamphlet for a new type of resilient living (Self-sufficient Urbanism), and guidelines for affordable housing (Housing Finance Authority Design Guidelines).
He practices Kadampa Buddhism and Vedanta Hinduism. He holds a non-secular Ph.D. in Comparative Religions, a Master in Architecture with a Certificate in Urban Design as well as a Master in City Planning with a Certificate in Historic Preservation from the University of Pennsylvania, a Certificate in Classical Architecture and Medieval Iconography from Cambridge University, in England, and a Bachelors in Architecture and Urbanism from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, in Colombia.
His sponsored research includes work for the Kellogg and Barr Foundations in Haiti, the Dupont Foundation in the City of Opa-Locka, the Florida Canin Award, the Knight Foundation Project in Community Building, the Miami Project, and the Housing Finance Authority in Miami-Dade County.
His latest professional work includes: a research series on urban evacuation and adaptation, colossal projects for the forthcoming climate disruption, public space interventions in the City of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, the redevelopment of an Industrial District in Miami, eight mini-skyscrapers in Medellin, urban design advisory for the City of Coral Gables, charrette collaborations in Coral Springs and the North End in West Palm Beach, urban “letterscapes ”, various collaborations in Central and South America (including the new towns of Cayala and El Naranjo, in Guatemala and La Serena, in Chile), and the master planning and implementation of “The Wave” - a 50,000 people new town in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman.

Adib Cure received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Miami and a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design degree from Harvard University. Upon graduation he went to work for the office of Machado & Silvetti, and in 2001 he established the firm of Cure & Penabad Architecture and Urban Design in Miami. The work of the office has received numerous awards including American Institute of Architects awards, state and local preservation awards, a National Congress for New Urbanism Award, and a Silver Medal prize at the 2010 Miami Biennale. Most recently, the firm was nominated as a finalist for the prestigious Marcus Corporation Architectural Prize for emerging architectural talent.

Victor Deupi is a Cuban American teacher of architectural history and theory, design, and representation at the University of Miami School of Architecture in Coral Gables. He received a Bachelor of Science in architecture from the University of Virginia, a Master of Architecture from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught previously at Fairfield University, the New York Institute of Technology, the University of Notre Dame, the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture in London, and has been a “Visiting Critic” at the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech. The principal focus of his research is on the art and architecture of the Early Modern Ibero-American world, and mid-20th-century Cuba. His books include Architectural Temperance: Spain and Rome, 1700-1759 (Routledge 2015), Transformations in Classical Architecture: New Directions in Research and Practice (Oscar Riera Ojeda Publishers, 2018), Emilio Sanchez in New York and Latin America (Routledge, 2020), Cuban Modernism: Mid-Century Architecture 1940-1970, with Jean-Francois Lejeune (Birkhäuser Verlag, 2020), and The Modern Stable and The Modern Winery, both with Oscar Riera Ojeda (Rizzoli, 2021). He has curated exhibitions on Cuban Architects at Home and in Exile: The Modernist Generation (with Jean-François Lejeune) at the Coral Gables Museum (Nov. 2016-Feb. 2017), and Emilio Sanchez in South Florida Collections (with Nathan Timpano) at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami (Feb.-May 2017). Dr. Deupi was also the President of the CINTAS Foundation which gives annual fellowships in Architecture and Design, the Visual Arts, Creative Writing, and Music Composition to Cubans and people of Cuban descent from 2016-2018.

Rodolphe el-Khoury is Dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture. Before coming to UMSoA in July, 2014, he was Canada Research Chair and Director of Urban Design at the University of Toronto, Head of Architecture at California College of the Arts, and Associate Professor at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has taught at Columbia University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Princeton University and has had Visiting Professor appointments at MIT, University of Hong Kong, and Rice University (Cullinen Visiting Chair). After earning a Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design, el-Khoury obtained a Master of Science in Architecture from MIT and his Ph.D. from Princeton University.

el-Khoury was trained as both a historian and a practitioner and continues to divide his time between scholarship and design. As a partner in Khoury Levit Fong (KLF), his award-winning projects include Beirut Martyr’s Square (AIA San Francisco), Stratford Market Square (Boston Society of Architecture), and the Shenzhen Museum of Contemporary Art (AIA Cleveland). His books on eighteenth-century European architecture include The Little House, An Architectural Seduction, and See Through Ledoux; Architecture Theatre, and the Pursuit of Transparency. Books on contemporary architecture and urbanism include Monolithic Architecture, Architecture in Fashion, States of Architecture in the Twenty-first Century: New Directions from the Shanghai Expo, and Figures: Essays on Contemporary Architecture.

el-Khoury’s current research in architecture focuses on applications for information technology, aiming for enhanced responsiveness and sustainability in buildings and smart cities. He is also working on the application of robotics and embedded technology in architecture in projects and prototypes for interactive and responsive environments, including immersive environments and multi-sensory architecture. With the tools and resources of RAD-UM, his lab at UMSoA, he aims to put every brick online and believes that "embedded technology empowers networked environments to better address the environmental and social challenges we face today."

Articles on his projects and research have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star and WIRED Magazine. He was also featured online (Gizmodo, DeZeen, Fast Company, Domus, Reuters) and on television and radio shows (CBC, Space Channel, NBC, TFO, BBC World), speaking about the Internet of Things and importance of connectivity. His work in this area is documented in The Living, Breathing, Thinking Responsive Buildings of the Future (Thames and Hudson, 2012). His 2013 TEDxToronto talk on Designing for the Internet of Things has been viewed more than 15,000 times.

Steven Fett is a full-time lecturer at the University of Miami, School of Architecture. He received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Minnesota, and a Master of Architecture and Master of Urban Design at the University of Miami. Steven, a licensed architect, is the founder of his own architectural design and planning firm, Steven Fett Architecture. Located in downtown Miami, the firm has won a number of important awards including the Florida Redevelopment Association’s President's Award, and the American Public Works Association’s, “Public Works Project of the Year” for his built redesign of Commercial Boulevard in downtown Lauderdale-by-the-Sea, Florida, a project he co-authored with fellow professor, Jaime Correa. Steven is a regular contributor to the School’s Open City Studio program, an itinerant urban laboratory that travels to international cities each summer.

Eric Firley is of French-German nationality and was born in Düsseldorf, Germany. He studied economics, architecture and city design in Fribourg, Lausanne, Weimar and London, and started his professional career in the real estate sector in Paris. Afterwards he worked for several years in design practices in Paris and London, before dedicating himself full-time to research and writing between 2007 and 2010. In 2011 he became assistant professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Firley is the initiator and co-author of Wiley’s Urban Handbook Series that consists of three reference works in the field of housing, high-rise urbanism and masterplanning. He has lectured in institutions around the world, including the Skyscraper Museum and Cooper Union in NYC, the Architectural Association and Bartlett School in London, UC Berkeley, the National University of Singapore, the Parisian Planning Office (APUR), Queensland University of Technology and McGill University in Montreal.
Firley’s research has been funded by various public and private sector entities, including Grosvenor, Stanhope, the Arts Council and Design for London. His current research focuses on urban design practice, alternative models of housing production and the impact of immigration on urban form.

José Alfredo Gelabert Marcelo (8 March 1927, Sagua La Grande, Cuba) and Rosa Navia Castaño (10 June 1929, Havana, Cuba) were architects who jointly founded and ran the firm “Gelabert-Navia Arquitectos,” which practiced in Cuba until 1960 and later in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Florida. Both Gelabert and Navia graduated from the University of Havana with degrees in architecture in 1952, Navia graduating first in her class. In May of 1953, the couple married and remained together for the rest of their lives and had three children: a son, José, and daughters Ana and Cristina.

While still practicing in Cuba, the couple completed a number of projects. In 1955, they built a residence on Conill and Santa Ana in the Ensanche del Vedado, followed by another residence in 1956 - both of which utilized modern codes and climate adaptation. In 1958 under the instruction of its then director, the historian Herminio Portell Vilá, the couple also designed the building originally known as the Instituto Cultural Cubano-Norteamericano (U.S.-Cuba Cultural Institute), now known as Cuba's Advanced Institute for Foreign Relations, described by Nick Miroff as “once a mainstay of the two countries' deep and complicated ties.”

In 1959, Gelabert became the Director of Architecture, Urban Design, and Construction of the City of Havana, where he was responsible for directing a number of projects including: the José Martí Sports Complex facing the Malecón; the launching of the expansion of the city to the other side of the harbor, which came to be known as La Habana del Este; the Parque Camilo Cienfuegos; as well as a number of schools, hospitals, and child care centers across the island. He was also the last freely elected president of the Colegio de Arquitectos de Cuba - an association formed, in the words of the founders in 1916, in order to “ensure compliance with current laws and greater prestige of the profession” (Arquitectura Cuba). During this time, Navia, described by her family as a feminist who would scoff at describing herself as such, ran the company’s office in her husband’s absence and embarked on design projects of her own; for example, in 1961 she designed the Ministry of Transportation, a modern high-rise building on Avenida de Rancho Boyeros between Lombillo and Tulipán. Navia’s solo command of the business when necessary was similar to her fellow female architect Gabriela Menéndez, who also ran her and her husband’s firm while he undertook a government position. However, despite the clear capability of these female architects in terms of their roles as both designers and business people, women are consistently under- and misrepresented in narratives of Cuban architectural history, as evidenced, for example, in Patrick Calmon de Carvalho Braga’s scholarship on Arcquitectura Cuba - a periodical published by the same Colegio de Arquitectos de Cuba that Gelabert resided over as President. Braga notes, “Authorship in the journal comprises either of anonymous editorials and articles or articles authored by male architects, often publishing as sole authors” (236), which raises a problem of the absence of women in written records of architectural practice and development. Subsequently, Florencia Peñate Díaz’s feminist architectural scholarship offers an important counternarrative to that of a modern Cuban landscape designed and built exclusively by men.1

Despite the fact that they eventually left Cuba in 1961 because of their counter-revolutionary stance, Gelabert and Navia’s attitude toward the revolution was not always negative. Their son, José A. Gelabert-Navia, who is Professor and former Dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Miami, stated that his father “was very much with the revolution until he was against the revolution” (qtd. in Hurley). When the revolution began to interrupt the young couple’s plans, however, they sent their children with their grandparents to live in Spain as, despite the fact that she was born and raised in Cuba, Navia was actually of Spanish origin. The couple sought asylum in the Venezuelan embassy and then fled to Puerto Rico, where they renewed their architectural firm and practiced for seventeen years, producing over one hundred built projects in that time. In 1978 they relocated again; this time they headed to Venezuela, where their work focused primarily on a large-scale, low-income Llano Alto community built in the desert State of Apure, which borders with Brazil and Colombia. Their 1981 move to Miami was the last the couple made. They remained here and continued to stay committed to the practice of architecture until the end of their lives; for example, in conjunction with internationally acclaimed architect Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey-Siegel, New York, they worked on the Joan Lehman Building of the (Miami) Museum of Contemporary Art in 1996. Their work featured in the recent exhibit, "Cuban Architects at Home and In Exile: The Modernist Generation." On October 17, 2017, Navia passed away in Miami, FL, surrounded by loved ones and was followed just eighteen days later by Gelabert on November 5, 2017. Their son, José, donated portfolios of their work to the Cuban Heritage Collection to safeguard their memory in Cuban architectural history.

Laura Bass
UGrow Fellow for the Department of Manuscripts and Archives Management, 2019-2020

1. See Florencia Peñate Díaz, “Significado de la obra de las arquitectas cubanas Elana y Alicia Pujals Mederos / The significance of the work of Cuban architects Elena and Alicia Pujals Mederos.” Arquitectura y Urbanismo, vol. 37, no. 1, 2016, pp. 26-36. Also, Diaz, “La obra de las arquitectas cubanas de la República entre los años 40 y fines de los 50 del siglo XX / The work of female Cuban architects of the Republic between the 1940s and the late 50s of the 20th century.” Arquitectura y Urbanismo, vol. 33, no. 1, 2012, pp. 70-82.

A graduate of Cornell University, Jose has been part of the Faculty since 1981. His primary teaching focus has been in the areas of Architectural Design and History of Colonialism and Globalization in Architecture. He was the founder of the School’s Rome Program and as part of it, he teaches a course in Italian Culture every Spring. Prof. Gelabert-Navia has been the author of numerous articles and has also been a practicing architect, directing the Miami office of Perkins + Will.

Gordon Gilbert was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Montreal, San Salvador, Mexico City, and Miami. Gilbert received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami in 1968 and his Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Miami in 1975. He is a registered architect in New York, Florida, New Jersey, Virginia. and Pennsylvania. He founded his architectural office, Gordon Gilbert Architect, in New York City in 1984. He was a founding member of the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture, and has developed conceptual and experimental work, including such projects as "Architecture of the Night," which was published and exhibited internationally. His most recent book, "Transparent Architecture," demonstrates the relationship of Gilbert's experimental, conceptual, and constructed work.

Carmen L. Guerrero is a licensed architect, Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives and Facilities and Associate Professor in Practice at the University of Miami School of Architecture. She received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Miami (1990) and a Master of Architecture degree from Cornell University (1994). Since 2000 she has been involved as Director for the School’s Rome program and has developed special courses on the architecture and urbanism of 20th century Italy. Her research has contributed to several international exhibitions and publications focusing on Italian Rationalism. Additionally, she has taught travel seminars and studios concentrating on the impact of regionalism on the design of modern & contemporary architecture in Europe and the Caribbean. The work produced by her students has contributed to preservation and revitalization efforts in Italy, Colombia and the Dominican Republic. Her teaching experience also includes interior design studio and elective courses. In 2008 her architecture and interior design firm received the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce City Beautiful Award followed by recognition in local and national publications. More recently she was awarded a grant from the Ministry of Education in Italy, which promotes academic collaborations with institutions of the Southern Italian hemisphere.

Denis Hector, R.A., LEED AP, is an Associate Professor in the University of Miami School of Architecture with a secondary appointment in the Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering. He received his B.Arch. from Cornell and his Masters from Penn. As a DAAD Fellow at the Institut fur Leichte Flaechentragwerke he conducted research in the laboratory of 2015 Pritzker Prize winner, Frei Otto. He has taught architectural design and structures at the University of Bath, Parsons, Columbia, and Penn. At UM, he has served as Director of Graduate Programs, Associate Dean in the School of Architecture, and co-chair of the Abess Center Ecosystem Science and Policy Faculty Advisory Board. He initiated the first National Science Foundation Hurricane Hazard Research Conference post-Andrew, edited Hurricane Hazard Mitigation, and participated in the Mississippi Renewal Forum Charrette after Hurricane Katrina, the Mississippi AIA Mississippi Building Code Workshop, the 2010 Haiti Charrette, and subsequent work in Haiti with colleagues in Partner in Health. He currently advises on lightweight structures, hazard mitigation building codes, and community resilience.