The Harvard Graduate School of Design is happy to announce the appointments of Jonathan Grinham as Assistant Professor of Architecture, Ana Maria León Crespo as Associate Professor of Architecture, and Hannah Teicher as Assistant Professor of Urban Planning, effective July 1, 2022.
Jonathan Grinham has served as Lecturer in Architecture at the GSD and a Senior Research Associate with the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities since 2018. He holds degrees in architecture and building science from Virginia Tech and a D.Des. degree from the GSD. Jonathan’s research brings an intensely interdisciplinary approach to climate change and the built environment, connecting material science with building science and design to examine questions on materiality, thermal health, and lifecycle carbon emissions. These questions have sparked the development of novel technologies, publications, and patents that address low-carbon building solutions through material innovation. Jonathan’s research has gained significant recognition through numerous funding awards, including the Harvard Climate Change Solutions Fund, the prestigious Department of Energy Advanced Building and Construction program, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering’s Validation Project program. Jonathan is passionate about translating his research into design-based learning. His teaching on the science of materials in the face of climate change continues to push the boundaries of building materials.
Ana María León Crespo joins us from the University of Michigan, where she was Assistant Professor in the History of Art and Romance Languages and Literatures departments, and in the School of Architecture. Ana María’s work studies how spatial practices and transnational networks of power and resistance shape the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. Ana María holds a diploma in architecture from UCSG Ecuador, an M.Arch. from Georgia Tech, an M.Des. with distinction from the GSD, and a Ph.D. in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT. She serves on the boards of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) and the Society of Architectural Historians and is co-founder of several collectives laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history, including Nuestro Norte es el Sur (Our North in the South), a group of architectural historians working from and about Latin America, and the Settler Colonial City Project, a research collective focused on the collaborative production of knowledge about cities on Turtle Island/Abya Yala/The Americas as spaces of ongoing settler colonialism, Indigenous survivance, and struggles for decolonization.
Hannah Teicher, currently a Researcher-in-Residence at the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, University of Victoria in Canada, joins the Department of Urban Planning and Design as an expert in mitigation and adaptation to climate change. Her research focuses on novel collaborations that advance adaptation, embodied carbon at the urban scale, and climate migration with a focus on receiving communities. For the Climigration Network, dedicated to closing the gap between communities and practitioners on assisted relocation, Hannah serves on the Network Council and Co-Chairs the Narrative Building Work Group. Hannah has a Ph.D. in urban and regional planning from MIT, an M.Arch. from the University of British Columbia, and a B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College. She received the Martin Fellowship for Sustainability in support of her research on urban/military collaborations for adaptation. Before beginning her doctoral studies in 2014, Teicher practiced architecture at Shape Architecture in Vancouver, served as a researcher for the Transportation Infrastructure and Public Space Lab, University of British Columbia, and taught at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. In 2014, a green infill project she worked on with Shape Architecture won the Vancouver Urban Design Award for Outstanding Sustainable Design from the City ofVancouver, and in 2013 an EV charging project she collaborated on with the TIPS Lab received the American Institute of Graphics Arts (Re)design Award.