Marilys R. Nepomechie of Florida International University Starts Term as ACSA President and Bruce Lindsey of Washington University in St. Louis as President-Elect; image via fiu.edu.

Marilys R. Nepomechie of Florida International University Starts Term as ACSA President and Bruce Lindsey of Washington University in St. Louis as President-Elect 

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is pleased to announce that Marilys Nepomechie, Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University (FIU), has begun her term as ACSA President for 2015-2016 academic year. She assumes the role one year after her election to the board as Vice President/President-Elect.

Since 2003, Nepomechie has represented ACSA on National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) visiting teams as both team member and chair, and authored white papers for the 2013 NAAB Accreditation Review Conference—on the role of social responsibility in architecture curricula, and on innovative models of education and accreditation. In 2004 Nepomechie co-chaired ACSA’s 92nd Annual Meeting, Archipelagos: Outposts of the Americas, in Miami, Florida.

As president of ACSA, Nepomechie has vowed to address the challenges facing ACSA schools, including diminishing institutional funding to support faculty and student work; a need to increase student and faculty diversity; the imperative to facilitate broad accessibility and affordability to our programs; the challenges of reframing the possibilities offered by online education; and in response to the breadth and rapid pace of change in the academy and the profession, the need to reassess, and perhaps recalibrate, our curricular structures.

Inaugural Director of the accredited professional program in Architecture at FIU, Nepomechie was lead faculty advisor for the award-winning FIU 2011 Solar Decathlon project and currently serves as the faculty advisor in architecture to the joint Tsinghua University (THU)-FIU Solar Decathlon China 2013 effort. She has served on the Editorial Review Board of Architectural Record and on the National Board of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2030 Commitment. Nepomechie is a registered architect and holds the Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been inducted to the AIA College of Fellows.

Bruce Lindsey, teacher and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, is also starting his term as Vice President this month. Lindsay has made significant contributions to beginning design education, sustainable design education, and community design education. He served as head of Auburn's School of Architecture from 2001-06, and in 2005, he received the AIA's National Teaching Honor Award for his work in beginning design at Auburn. Before that, he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, where he served as associate head of Carnegie Mellon's School of Architecture and as associate professor of art and architecture from 1994-2001. In 1997, he co-chaired "Not Only But Also," the 14th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student in Pittsburgh. Lindsey has been a visiting professor at Arizona State University and at Catholic University, and was the Pierce Visiting Critic at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He will begin his term as ACSA President in July 2016.

> via acsa-arch.org