Archives: Faculties

Biography

Megan Weyland is a registered architect and a LEED accredited professional. She joins the University of Florida School of Architecture as an Instructional Assistant Professor. Prior to joining the Florida School of Architecture, Weyland practiced in both Chicago and New Orleans where she managed projects of varied scales and typologiesranging from small scale residential, high-rise mixed-use, Institutional and commercial developments. During her tenure in New Orleans, Weyland also served as Director of Career Development for the Tulane School of Architecture Built Environment and taught courses in Professional Practice where she focused on bridging the gap between the architectural practice and architectural academia through her practice and positions in local organizations.

Weyland takes an interdisciplinary approach to design, research, and pedagogy grounded in both professional engagement and academic advancement. Professionally her work has focused on understanding how buildings perform in a way that allows them to be sustainable both from a operational standpoint as well as by the user. She focuses on how collaboration between all phases and team members work to advance these building technologies. In her academic work, she takes a hybrid approach to providing understanding and transparency about the profession while maintaining the importance of the academic studio culture and the freedom of design-led learning.

Weyland holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Mississippi State University and a Master of Architecture from Tulane University. She has served on the Louisiana AIA board at both the state and local level.

Biography

Frederick Chando Kim is an architect, researcher, and educator based in Gainesville, Florida, serving as an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida School of Architecture. His research focuses on the generative and analytical possibilities of machine learning in architectural form. Frederick pursued his doctorate at the Media x Design Lab at EPFL, where his thesis was nominated for the EPFL Research and City of Lausanne prizes. He previously served as Assistant Professor in Computational Design at the National University of Singapore, taught at the School of Architecture and Computer Science at EPFL, and was a Junior Faculty member at ETH Zürich. He has conducted workshops at NYCU in Hsinchu, NUS, ETH Singapore, SUPSI in Mendrisio, and D-lab at Kyoto Institute of Technology. Frederick holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-leads Creative Data Critical Design with Mikhael Johanes, exploring innovative ways of using data for architectural and urban design approaches. His professional experience includes work with Convergeo in Lausanne, AGPS Architecture in Zürich/Los Angeles, Safdie Architects in Cambridge, Massachusetts, SOM San Francisco, and Gensler Los Angeles. He has been involved in numerous research and design projects internationally, including the co-curation of Artificial Architecture at EPFL Pavilions. His collaborative projects, Artificial Swissness: Design Brain, was featured at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, and Alpine Shelter Skuta received an AIA New England Design Honor Award and a nomination for the EU Mies Award. He co-authored the journal paper titled “On GANs, NLPs and Architecture,” which won the ACSA Best Article Award. He was also a recipient of the Young CAADRIA Award.

Biography

Dr. Tzu-Chieh Kurt Hong holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from Georgia Institute of Technology, specializing in Design Computation, an MS degree in Digital Fabrication from the University of Michigan, and an M.Arch degree, along with BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering from National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. Before transitioning into architecture, he worked for several years as a professional digital circuit engineer. His research is driven by his interdisciplinary background in electrical engineering and architectural design, with the goal of integrating computational logic with creative design thinking.

In architecture, his work focuses on Computational Design, Generative Design, Rule-based Systems, and Digital Fabrication. In computation, his research includes Artificial Intelligence, Visual Computing, Visual Data Synthesis, Very-High-Level eXpressive Programming Languages (VHXL), and Very-Large-Scale Design Automation (VLSA).

His doctoral dissertation, Shape Machine: Shape Embedding and Rewriting in Visual Design, introduced a visual computing system that enables designers to perform shape embedding and replacement operations within computer-aided design environments. This research received the 2022 Architectural Research Centers Consortium Dissertation Award for its contributions to shape recognition in CAD systems. In the same year, he also received the ARCC King Medal for excellence in architectural research.

Since 2016, Dr. Hong has taught computational design, computer programming, digital fabrication, and related topics at multiple institutions, including National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, the University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Kansas.

Biography

Yvonne Yexuan Gu is the incoming tenure-track Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. Her work examines architecture as ecological infrastructure across scales, from building assemblies to neighborhoods and watersheds. Framed through “Tectonic Ecologies,” her research and creative practice investigate infrastructural modernity, alternative water ontologies, and biomaterial ecologies in architecture. She explores how structure, material, and building systems can mediate heat, air, moisture, light, and water while shaping everyday inhabitation.

Gu holds an M.Arch from Harvard GSD and a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She previously served as a Teaching Assistant Professor at UIUC and as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati. She also leads 3h57m, an independent design-research practice working across architecture, landscape, ecology, and material experimentation.

Her work spans built prototypes, design-build pedagogy, and research on bio-based building materials, with peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Sustainability, Green Chemistry and Bioresource Technology. Supported by the Harvard China Fund, the Harvard Fairbank Center, and UIUC, her projects translate questions of water, material circularity, and environmental performance into built experiments, scholarly research, and public-facing design work. At UF, she will advance teaching, research, and creative practice around subtropical climate assemblies, water intelligence, and resilient forms of inhabitation.

Aoife Houlihan Wiberg is delighted to join The School of Architecture at the University of Florida as Professor of Architecture and Associate Director of Research. She is an international architect, academic, and researcher with over 15 years of experience in Net Zero Emission buildings and neighbourhood design, living labs, embodied carbon methods, and data visualisation. She has been a guest speaker across Asia, Europe, and the USA and serves on several international scientific and editorial committees.

Previously, she held academic positions at the University of Bath and Ulster University in the UK. She also spent a decade at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, contributing to the Research Centre for Zero Emission Buildings and the Research Centre for Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities.

She joins us from the UK from The Department of Architecture and Engineering at The University of Bath and at The Belfast School of Architecture at Ulster University, Belfast where she was Professor of Architecture, and Chair of Research in Architecture. She worked for 10 years at The Research Centre for Zero Emission Buildings (ZEB http://zeb.no/index.php/en) and The Research Centre for Zero Emission Neighbourhoods in Smart Cities (https://fmezen.no) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.

She is a Chartered member of The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), graduated as an architect from Cardiff University and completed her M.Phil. and PhD Degrees in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, England. She serves as the UK National Expert in the International Energy Agency (IEA EBC) Annex 89 – Ways to Implement Net-zero Whole Life Carbon Buildings (2023-28). Previous she led research as both UK and Norway expert in Annex 72 – Assessing Life Cycle Related Environmental Impacts Caused by Buildings (2017-2023) and serving as Norway’s national expert in Annex 57 – Evaluation of Embodied Energy and CO2eq Emissions for building construction (2012-2015).