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September news flashes from SA+P

Updates on faculty, students and alumni from the School of Architecture + Planning
Eran Ben-Joseph's Bronx practicum was one of 10 winners out of 150 submissions to a design competition sponsored by the Institute for Urban Design; their work was showcased in an exhibit and a special publication at the first ever Urban Design Week Festival in New York City.

Masoud Akbarzadeh MArch '11 has been awarded a $20K Research and Travel Fellowship from the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation; this is the second year in a row the fellowship has gone to a student from SA+P: last year the distinction went to Azra Dawood SMArchS '10; both continue their studies here this year.

Marcelo Coelho MAS PhD '12 and Jamie Zigelbaum MAS SM '09 won Honorary Mention in Interactive Arts at Ars Electronica this year for their project Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, a lighting installation composed of magnetic, physical pixels, stainless steel and remote controllers.

Eric Jay Dolin PhD '95 has received a slew of awards for his most recent book, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, including being chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Seattle Times and one of the top 10 books of 2010 by the Rocky Mountain Land Library.

Maryam Eskandari SMArchS '11 will present her thesis '(Re)Constructing the Place of Gender in Contemporary American Mosque' at the ACSA Conference in Houston in October.

Topher McDougal MCP '07, PhD '11 has published his thesis, 'Law of the Landless: The Dalit Bid for Land Redistribution in Gujarat, India' as a peer-reviewed article in the L&D Review.

Tony Pizzigati SB '92, an early advocate of open-source computing, died in an car accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley in 1995; his legacy is honored by the annual Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, the nation's highest honor for software developers working with nonprofits to help advance innovative social change. Nominations have now opened for this year's $10K prize.

Nithya Raman MCP '08 has published an article in the inaugural issue of Urban Affairs, a peer-reviewed publication put out by Economic and Political Weekly; 'The Board and the Bank: Changing Policies towards Slums in Chennai' is based on her MCP thesis.

Kelly Robinson PhD '91 has been appointed director of the Cornwall Center at Rutgers-Newark, a part of the School of Public Affairs and Administration promoting research and interchange among scholars of urban and metropolitan life, government leaders, community-based organizations and private citizens.

Alice Shay and Stephen Kennedy, MCP candidates, are among three finalist teams in the AECOM Design + Planning student design competition; they are competing for a prize of up to $15K with up to $25K of in-kind donation to be made available to a charitable organization to help realize the winning entry.

Steve Weikal MSRED/MCP '08 is developing Concord Riverwalk, a pocket neighborhood of high-performance homes in West Concord, Mass., designed for minimal environmental impact, with craftsman-like quality, and featuring a Net Zero Energy standard; more than 75 percent of the homes are already sold.

Andres Sevtsuk SM '06, PhD '10, principal investigator of the City Form Research Group, has announced a new Urban Network Analysis toolbox to help urban planners describe the spatial patterns of cities, using network analysis methods such as those used to study social networks; the new toolbox is distributed as free and open-source plug-in.

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