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.

For the fourth consecutive year, CAPLA undergraduate architecture student teams were finalists in the international Solar Decathlon Design Challenge. This year the teams placed second in the Urban Single-Family Housing and Mixed-Use Multifamily Building divisions.

Congratulations to our Class of 2021 B.Arch, BS SBE, M.Arch, MS Arch, MLA, MRED and MS Urban Planning students! View student pages, projects, awards, videos and more on the dynamic CAPLA Convocation Showcase website and then join us online for the Graduation Ceremony May 16.

First-year MS Urban Planning student Chrissy Scarpitti has been awarded first place in the 2021 Planning Excellence Competition sponsored by the Friends of Planning for her project Resilient Energy: Community-Scale Solar Microgrid Siting on the Island of Puerto Rico.

B.Arch student Rachael Varin, who was born and raised in Tucson, has used her CAPLA studio and design/build experience, as well as her internships in Arizona and California, to build upon her passion for construction.

Fourth-year B.Arch student Ana Astiazaran has been awarded the top student sustainable design excellence award from the American Institute of Architects and Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Master of Landscape Architecture student Christian Aguilar Murrieta is from Ciudad Constitucion, Baja California Sur, Mexico, a small city surrounded by agricultural fields and chirinolas. She moved to Tucson in 2013 after earning her undergraduate degree in sustainable tourism at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California Sur.

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.

Greg Veitch, who is from New Haven, Connecticut, entered CAPLA's Master of Architecture program after receiving his undergraduate degree in English from the University of Connecticut. Prior to enrolling at CAPLA, he worked for two years at a design firm in Aspen, Colorado.

88 students participated in 334 interviews conducted by 28 employers in an all-digital format at the 11th Annual Job Interview Fair held over a two-day span in February 2021. For the first time, CAPLA added sponsorships and scholarships to the dynamic event.

Hunter Lohse '22 MLA was awarded second prize in the UArizona 2021 Student Showcase categories of Sustainability and Environmental Impact for his project Free Water: An Analysis of Potential Impacts of Large-Scale Residential Rainwater Harvesting, which calculates the potential impacts of rainwater harvesting if implemented by single-family homes across Tucson.

Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Emma Nakpairat came to CAPLA and the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program in Tucson to be inspired by the Sonoran Desert—and to combine her love of the outdoors with her thirst to improve the environment in which we live.