CAPLA Equity, Diversity & Inclusion News & Headlines

Master of Landscape Architecture student Irene Pineda is from La Puente, California, located 20 miles east of downtown Los Angeles. She earned her BA in Communicative Disorders from San Francisco State University and served as a public school teacher before falling in love with the Sonoran Desert and joining the MLA program.

Shepley Bulfinch, a national architecture firm known for design excellence and innovation, has announced the appointment of Angela Watson FAIA to president and CEO. Watson is a long-time principal and design leader at the firm, as well as chair of the board. She has served on the CAPLA Futures Council, a multi-perspective advisory board to the CAPLA dean, since its inception in February 2019.

Bachelor of Architecture student David Zúñiga is from Nogales, Arizona. In this profile, he discusses his passion for cinema and architecture, how architecture school makes him a critical thinker, his experience in the CAPLA Hispanic student organization PUENTE, how he's learning to be patient and more.

Ash Avila, a Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Built Environments student from Nogales, Arizona, who will graduate in 2023, has been awarded an acclaimed Transportation Research Board (TRB) Minority Student Fellowship for 2022. Avila is one of 24 students selected by TRB.

To help bridge government disparate efforts, Ladd Keith is leading an effort called Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard for Heat, or PIRSH, that has been awarded a $150,000 grant from the NOAA Climate Program Office, under its Extreme Heat Risk Initiative.

Helen Erickson published the essay “Buffalo Soldiers on the Southwest Border” in The Field, the blog of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Professional Practice Network. The essay explores the historic Black landscape of Camp Naco.

In an op-ed in the June 11, 2021 edition of the Arizona Daily Star, Arlie Adkins calls out the ongoing discussion about regional coordination in the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), an independent taxing district within Pima County that manages multimodal transportation projects.

“Heat is the number-one weather-related killer,” says Ladd Keith in The Washington Post article, “Heat and Smog Hit Low-Income Communities and People of Color Hardest, Scientists Say,” published on May 25, 2021.

“Vegetation is linked to better air, lower temperatures and less stress,” says Adriana Zuniga in dual May 14, 2021 stories on Tucson’s plans to plant trees to combat climate change appearing in Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate.

Associate Professor of Architecture Clare Robinson has been a Berkeley Prize Committee member since 2013 and judged the esteemed competition this year. In this editorial, she speaks to the Prize’s importance in addressing social issues in architecture, as well as her own teaching and research.

Teresa Rosano has been named the inaugural Anne Graham Rockfellow Memorial Award winner by the University of Arizona chapter of WIAS. Rockfellow, who taught at UArizona from 1897 to 1900, paved the way for other women pursuing architecture as an academic degree and profession.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Altaf Engineer and Lecturer in Architecture Sandra Bernal-Cordova helped build the SCALE UP curriculum and train its facilitators, and are now preparing to engage CAPLA students and recent graduates in the award-winning, community-oriented program.