Patrick Danahy is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Previously, he has held positions as the Emerging Scholar in Design at the University of Texas at Austin, the Design Innovation Fellow at Ball State University and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. Patrick holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Clemson University, and a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Kanter-Tritsch Prize in Energy and Architectural Innovation, the Paul Cret T-Square Fellowship, the Van Alen Traveling Fellowship, the Dales Fellowship, the Kohn Fellowship, the Schenk-Woodman Merit Award and upon graduating was awarded the Arthur Spayd Brooke Memorial Silver Medal.

In 2022, he was selected as the distinguished professor of an Advanced Design Studio at Texas A&M University, where he received the ‘Best Design Studio’ award for that year. He has taught workshops on emerging media and digital technologies including at the 2022 ACADIA conference, the UCL Bartlett RC20 Skills-Share program, the University of Kentucky, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. His teaching focuses on computation and robotics, integrating architectural reference with emerging machine-learning technologies.

Patrick's research has been presented in international conferences including Digital Futures Young, ACADIA, ICRA, TRAITS Post Digital Neobaroque, SIGRADI and CAADRIA, where his team received the award for best presentation runner up. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the ENVD Gallery at the University of Colorado Boulder, at the Month of Modern, and in galleries at the Pratt Institute, Ball State University, the University of Texas and the University of Pennsylvania.

Patrick Kastner is a researcher and educator specializing in environmental performance simulation and decarbonization of buildings and cities, and directs the Sustainable Urban Systems Lab at Georgia Tech. He is an Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and holds a courtesy appointment with the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

His goal is to empower urban decision-makers with software tools that place sustainability at the forefront of the profession. He leads a Vertically Integrated Project titled Surrogate Modeling for Urban Regeneration (SMUR), which attracts a diverse group of students ranging from sophomore to graduate level, representing various engineering disciplines and other related fields across Georgia Tech.

He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in Systems Science and Engineering from Cornell University in 2022. During his doctoral research, he developed Eddy3D, a microclimate modeling software toolkit for Rhino & Grasshopper, now adopted by leading institutions in both academia and practice. He previously taught at Cornell and UPenn.

Originally from Germany, Kastner holds an M.S. in Sustainable Building Science from TU Munich, and a B.S. in Energy Engineeringfrom FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. While in Munich, he was fortunate enough to study at the Center for Digital Technology and Management and enjoyed his time leading the operations team at TEDxTUM.

Hui Cai is a professor of the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, she served as the Chair of the Department of Architecture, and the Director of Research at the Institute of Health and Wellness Design at the University of Kansas. She also previously served as the Health + Science research leader and designer at CallisonRTKL Associates in Dallas. Cai received her Ph.D. degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology after several years of architectural education and practice in China and Singapore.

Dr. Cai’s research focuses on using a performance-driven and evidence-based design approach to analyze the relationship between culture, human behavior, and the physical environment, especially in healthcare settings and healthy communities. Dr. Cai combines various analytical tools in her research, such as space syntax analysis, discrete event simulations, and behavioral mappings. Cai disseminates her work extensively through numerous publications and presentations. Her work in healthcare research has received several awards, including the International Academy Award for Best Research project, AIA-AAH/AAH Foundation Burgun Fellowship, and the Inaugural Wilbur H (Tib) Tusler, Jr. Health Design Research Prize awarded by the Foundation for Health Environments Research. She is recently named as 2021 HCD 10 Healthcare Design Educator. She also served on the Board of Directors for the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

An environmental psychologist and professor emeritus of architecture, Craig Zimring directs the SimTigrate Design Lab. He and his colleagues and students focus on how innovative, research-informed design can improve health and healthcare, and how research can be incorporated into classroom teaching, both to improve design and help students develop skills for practice. He has conducted over $7M in research with and for Mayo Clinic, Emory Healthcare, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Military Health System, HKS Architects, HDR Architects, and many others, including safety-net clinics and international providers of healthcare. He has published over 100 scholarly and professional publications and received 11 awards for his research. He has given numerous keynote and plenary addresses to organizations and meetings such as Australian Healthcare Week, Institute for Patient and Family-Centered Care, and Chinese Hospital Association. His Ph.D. and master's graduates serve in teaching and leadership positions in universities and practice.

He currently serves on the board of the Center for Health Design and has served on the boards of the Environmental Design Research Association, the National Academies’ Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment, the Joint Commission’s Roundtable on the Hospital of the Future and other organizations. In addition to his work on healthcare, Zimring served as a senior scientist in developing the 2010 New York City Active Design Guidelines and was a founding member of the Center for Active Design.

She is an Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Architecture and a practicing designer, researcher, and educator who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. As an avid photographer and illustrator, her work has been recognized in the American Institute of Architects National Photography Competition and she has contributed graphics to several exhibitions and publications. As an educator, she was recognized as one of two recipients of the 2017-2018 American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS)/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award and a 2021 AIAS Educator Honor Award. 

Her research and practice experiences span design/build, early intervention design education, transatlantic studies, and historic site documentation and visualization. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in fall 2021 for the project "From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South," supporting research and development of the Race, Space, and Architecture in the United States seminar at Georgia Tech. 

Expanding experiences abroad to enrich both teaching and research agendas , she was the 2015 Society of Architectural Historians’ H. Allen Brooks Travelling Fellow. Between June 2016 and May 2017, she traveled to Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Cuba, and Japan to research the impact of tourism on cultural heritage sites; research blog posts can be found here. 

Currently, she is working with Auburn University Associate Professor Liu and an interdisciplinary team from the McWhorter School of Building Science, the Department of History, and the Media Production Group on “Walking in the Footsteps of History”, an experimental survey and modeling project to digitally reconstruct the area south of the Edmund Pettus Bridge during the 'Bloody Sunday' events of March 7, 1965. This project is working to record and represent the built environment through the use of 3D LiDAR scans, UAV photogrammetry, and digital modeling. The team was awarded a $50,000 grant 2019 National Park Service African American Civil Rights Grant Program to compile a Historic Structures Report on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

Willkens serves as a Georgia Tech Institute for People and Technology initiative lead for research activities related to just, resilient, and informed communities.

Ingeborg Rocker is a senior executive of sustainable Industry Innovation & Transformation. In 2014, she joined the international software company Dassault Systemes, as the Vice President, where she developed Sustainable Cross- Industry Innovations from strategy to realization. Within this context, she launched the Smart City Project 3DEXPERIENCity, virtualizing Singapore City State and developed cyber-physical systems with the manufacturing and construction industry, placing software and hardware in the loop for the enhanced simulation, optimization, automation, operation, and maintenance of assets and processes. I. Rocker’s ongoing work focuses on sustainable cross-industry innovation fostering a circular economy. 

Ingeborg is a practicing architect, who worked as lead designer with Peter Eisenman on the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. In 2006, she co-founded Rocker-Lange Architect, a research-focused architecture firm located in Boston and Hong Kong. The office works across scales on computer-generated sustainable product design, architecture, and urbanism. The office has been recognized for its written and design work emphasizing the role the digital medium plays in the conception and realization of sustainable cross-scale design interventions. 

She holds a Dipl.-Ing in Engineering from the RWTH Aachen, an MSAAD from Columbia University, and a MA, and Ph.D., from Princeton. She is an enthusiastic educator, researcher, and academic with extensive teaching experience at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University, where she worked as an Associate and Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Design, and served as the Director of MARCH 1 Admissions, the Director of the Digital Workshop Series, the Director of the International Exchange Programs, and the Coordinator of MARCH Core- and Option studios. She is a dedicated researcher and advised more than 40+ thesis and doctoral students. 

Dr. Rocker is an academic and industry thought leader who frequently presents on sustainable industry innovation, transformation, and associated business models. Her work has been internationally published and contributes to the discourses in the industry and academy. She has presented and exhibited her work internationally and received local, national, and international recognition and awards.

Tarek Rakha is a researcher, educator, and entrepreneur who integrates building design technology and environmental sustainability with the needs of underserved communities. He is Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the High Performance Building Lab (HPBL) at Georgia Tech, and Co-founder and CEO of Lamarr.AI, a startup that commercializes technology developed through his funded academic research. Tarek is an architect by training, and before joining Georgia Tech in 2019 he was Assistant Professor at Syracuse University, after earning a Ph.D. in Building Technology from MIT in 2015.

Tarek develops novel areas of scholarship focusing on aerial data and robotics for building envelope diagnostics using computer-vision drones, urban energy sensing and computational informatics, as well as heat vulnerability and outdoor thermal comfort modeling at the building and neighborhood scales. His research received support worth over $4M (total project volume ~$7M) from federal agencies such as the US DOE, ARPA-E, and the NSF. His work was also funded by state authorities such as NYSERDA and both NYSDOT and GDOT, philanthropies such as the Sloan Foundation, as well as corporate sponsors including the Coca-Cola Company. He has published his work as author and co-author in more than 70 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and two have won best paper awards in conferences. He was recently nationally recognized by the Emerging Contributor Award from IBPSA-USA.

As an educator, Tarek connects design, technology, and climate change-centered studios and courses with social justice and the needs of marginalized communities. He was awarded the Georgia Tech Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 Award based on exceptional student evaluation surveys. In 2022, He mentored the DOE’s Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Residential Division Grand Winner team. The team also took home first place in the contest's new Retrofit Housing division. In addition, student groups in his co-taught design studio competed against 400+ submissions in the AIA and ACSA’s 2019 International Design Competition: Here+Now, and won 1st Place and an Honorable Mention (2/6 awards). Furthermore, he coalesces service with his scholarship. He was invited to the Symposium on Simulation for Architecture and Urban Design’s board (SimAUD), and co-edited two conference proceedings as the 2018 General Chair in TU Delft and as the 2019 Program Chair and host of the 10-year anniversary at Georgia Tech.

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