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Megan Panzano receives Harvard Excellence in Teaching Award

Megan Panzano (MArch ’10), design critic in architecture, is the recipient of a Harvard Excellence in Teaching Award for her instruction in the Harvard College Architecture Studies track for undergraduate students. This annual award, administered by the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning in cooperation with the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Education, acknowledges a select number of Harvard instructors for the excellence of their work with students and the strength of their commitment to teaching.

Panzano is honored specifically for her instruction in the studio course Transformations, which introduces basic architectural concepts and techniques used to address issue of form, material, and the process of making. Last year, she received this award for her instruction in the spring 2015 Transformations course.

Panzano’s Transformations course received a record number of interested students for the Spring 2016 semester; more than 40 undergraduates applied through a competitive admissions process for the 10 spaces available in the course.

For students of Harvard College, Architecture Studies is a track within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its History of Art and Architecture concentration, jointly administered by the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the GSD. The track began in Fall 2012.

Megan Panzano, design critic in architecture
Megan Panzano, design critic in architecture

At the GSD, Panzano is currently teaching first semester architecture core studio, Project. She has taught architecture studio, concurrent with practice, for the past five years at both Harvard and Northeastern University. She has also served as an invited critic at the University of Pennsylvania, Temple and Drexel Universities, Tufts, Boston Architectural College, Yale University, and MIT.

Through her independent practice, studioPM, Panzano is currently working on an assembly of projects addressing spaces of change across a range of architectural scales. She previously worked as a senior designer and project manager at Utile, Inc., where she completed projects of diverse scale, including a highway de-elevation master plan, new townhouses in South Boston, and office space constructed of reclaimed materials in Charlestown. Prior to her education at the GSD, she worked closely with Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown at Venturi, Scott Brown + Associates in Philadelphia.

Panzano graduated cum laude from Yale University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture with honors in 2004. She her Master of Architecture with distinction in 2010 from the GSD, where she was the recipient of the John E. Thayer Award for outstanding academic achievement. She was also the 2010 winner of the GSD’s James Templeton Kelley Thesis Prize.