Iowa State University is pleased to announce the appointment of Deborah Hauptmann as Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture. Only recently arrived at ISU, Professor Hauptmann was previously Director of the Delft School of Design at the TU Delft, The Netherlands. Hauptmann practiced Architecture in Switzerland, Spain and America; her research draws on a trans-disciplinary approach to architecture, including disciplines of art, philosophy, cultural & media studies, social science and neuroscience as exemplified in her edited volume Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics.

We are also pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Andrea Wheeler as Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture, where she teaches courses in technical building systems and comprehensive design. Wheeler has degrees in Architecture and Mechanical Engineering from Oxford Brookes University as well as a PhD from the University of Nottingham. In 2007 she was awarded a prestigious three-year ESRC/EPSRC fellowship award to examine sustainable schools and subsequently worked as a research fellow for a central UK government research unit. She has recently been awarded $12,000 in seed funding to continue this research with a project entitled Iowa’s New School Buildings: A Future Invested in Sustainability.

In addition to these new appointments, Ulrike Passe has been promoted to Associate Professor with Tenure. Passe has been a faculty member at Iowa State since 2006, where she teaches architectural design and environmental forces and control systems and serves as director of the Center for Building Energy Research and plank leader of the Iowa NSF EPSCoR Building Science plank. Her research focuses on the relationship of spatial composition and fluid dynamics of air-flow as an approach to energy efficient building design and the evaluation of building integrated passive and renewable energy systems. She received her Diplom-Ingenieur in Architecture from the Technical University in Berlin and is a licensed architect in Germany.