College of Built Environments at the University of Washington.
Message from the Dean
In addition to you, this fall CBE welcomes four highly distinguished and accomplished faculty members, including Dr. Qing Shen, chair and professor, Department of Urban Design and Planning; Kate Simonen SE, AIA, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture; Dr. Christopher Bitter, Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Design and Planning; and Dr. Omar El-Anwar, Assistant Professor, Department of Construction Management.
Dr. Qing Shen arrives in Seattle via College Park, where he served as associate dean for the University of Maryland School of Architecture and Planning. He succeeds Professor Hilda Blanco, who retired in fall 2007 after five years of distinguished service; and interim chairs Daniel Abramson (2008–09) and Frank Westerlund (2007–08), who ably and unselfishly accepted the burden of interim appointments while the college conducted its exhaustive national search for Dr. Blanco’s replacement.
Dr. Shen holds degrees from Zhejiang University in China, the University of British Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate in city and regional planning. He is widely known and greatly respected within the American and international planning communities. His research addresses urban spatial structure, in particular the environmental and distributive consequences of alternative patterns of urban development at the metropolitan scale, which he examines for land use and transportation policy implications. He has authored or co-authored more than 60 scholarly publications in premier journals in urban planning and closely related disciplines. His areas of expertise include urban economics, transportation planning, statistical methods, and Geographic Information Systems; his current interests include the role of information and communication technologies in shaping the urban future, with particular interest in how these technologies enable cities to adapt to environmental changes. Professor Shen maintains strong institutional alliances with Nanjing University and Tongji University in China, and has long been engaged in the development of global programs of scholarly exchange and research, especially in areas related to the environmental and social challenges of urbanization.
We are also especially pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Jeffrey Hou as chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. Dr. Hou, who joined the department in 2002, brings a powerfully multidisciplinary perspective to his new assignment. He earned both his Ph.D. in Environmental Planning and his Master of Architecture degrees from the University of California, Berkeley; his Master of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania; and his Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Cooper Union in New York. The recipient of many grants and awards, Dr. Hou is recognized for his innovations in the areas of community participation and design education. He works broadly across diverse communities and contexts, traversing cultural and economic boundaries through a broad range of projects, from wildlife conservation to the rebuilding of indigenous villages and the design of open urban space and streetscapes. His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Landscape Journal, and the Journal of Architectural Education, among others. He is co-author (with Julie Johnson and Laura Lawson) of Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Urban Community Gardens in Seattle (University of Washington Press, 2009) and contributed to the widely praised anthology Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism (Metropolis Books, 2008).
Dr. Hou is a valuable partner in college-wide interdisciplinary initiatives, not least as co-author of the college’s first BE Lab, which focuses on urban resilience and hazard mitigation in Sichuan Province, China. His contributions to interdepartmental synergy have appreciably enriched our sense of common purpose within the college.
Professors Shen, Simonen, Bitter, and El-Anwar—and in his new capacity, Professor Hou—add great strength and critical perspective to one of the country’s premier environmental design and planning faculties. CBE faculty members annually generate or sustain on average over $5 million in research grants and contracts; they publish prodigiously; they consistently earn local and national recognition for teaching excellence; and they improve and enrich our communities through their singularly deep and longstanding commitment to the scholarship of engagement.
We are honored to welcome our new colleagues, we look forward to their contributions, and we encourage you to stay tuned for news of their continuing productivity and accomplishments.
Daniel S. Friedman, Ph.D., FAIA
Dean