The Urban Land Institute Hines Student Competition is a prestigious annual contest in which student teams compete to create the best solution to a complex urban design problem. In the past, the grand prize has always gone to students from American universities. That streak ended this week when a Canadian team, including two students from the Daniels Faculty, took the competition's top spot for 2021.

The winning team included Ruotian Tan, a Daniels Faculty Master of Urban Design student, and Chenyi Xu, a Daniels Faculty Master of Architecture student. They had three teammates from other Toronto universities: Frances Grout-Brown and Leorah Klein, urban planning students at Ryerson University, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The group made its final submission to the competition's jury on April 8, in a videoconference presentation. The Urban Land Institute, which holds the competition, announced the win on Monday.

The all-Toronto team bested a field of 104 other entires from schools around North America. The four other finalists represented a number of America's top schools, including Penn State, Columbia, Berkeley, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

In addition to the bragging rights that come with having impressed the competition's high-powered jury of practitioners from the fields of design, land use, and real estate, the students will get something a little more tangible: a $50,000 (U.S.) prize to split.

"Reflecting on this experience in its entirety, it’s surreal how much we’ve learned along the way," the team said in a statement to the Urban Land Institute. "Though each member of the team brought different skills to the table, we were strongly aligned in our aspirations for the site and were proud to present our proposal rooted in enabling physical and social connectivity and achieving economic and environmental resilience."

The group's master plan includes a 107,000-square foot community centre.

The ULI Hines Student Competition asks students to form multidisciplinary teams and tackle a multifaceted urban design project. This year's competition brief called for groups to develop master plans for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. Student proposals had to take into account a number of goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and access to transportation. Teams were required not only to design ways of transforming the neighbourhood, but also to develop phased implementation plans and financial pro formas.

The Daniels/Ryerson/York team's design, titled "Fusion," was unique among the competition's finalists in that it didn't include any tourist infrastructure. Instead, the group chose to focus on building a lively pedestrian promenade for locals, lined with mixed-income residences, office space, retail, and a 107,000-square-foot community centre with housing for seniors inside.

The Fusion site plan.

The group's master plan also included a network of green infrastructure intended to control the flow of stormwater across the site. Permeable pavement and street bioswales would allow the East Village to absorb rain and store it for reuse in a series of local gardens and green roofs. A vertical farming greenhouse would make it possible for the neighbourhood to produce some of its own food.

This attention to environmental sustainability and agriculture won the competition jury's approval. "Fusion stood out as it pushed a new paradigm for an urban neighborhood based on the strong regional legacy of agriculture," ULI Hines jury chair Diana Reid wrote in a statement. "Their financing plan and design enabled economic resilience through small scale food growth and distribution, local culinary incubation, and research-driven employment opportunities."

Learn more about Fusion and the other ULI Hines Student Competition 2021 finalists on the Urban Land Institute Americas website.

Top image: The group's design for a vertical farming greenhouse.

The Daniels Faculty congratulates professor Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe, founding partners of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, on receiving the 2021 Royal Architectural Institute of Canada's Gold Medal. Awarded to practitioners whose work has made a significant and lasting contribution to Canadian architecture, the Gold Medal is this country's highest national architectural honour.

“During the 33 years that I have known Brigitte and Howard, I have been struck by how their architecture, academic and artistic pursuits are so deeply rooted in an understanding of landscape and site, research and history, and innovation in both craft and materials," says Robert Wright, interim dean of the Daniels Faculty. "Their work transcends traditional architectural practice at the highest level of cultural significance — both in Canada, and internationally. An instrumental member of the Daniels Faculty for decades, Brigitte has raised the quality of our programs and inspired countless students. The RAIC Gold Medal is a fitting honour and on behalf of the entire school community, I congratulate Brigitte and Howard on this extraordinary achievement."

In a statement about the award, the RAIC's Gold Medal jury noted Shim and Sutcliffe's lasting impact on the architectural field both within Canada and around the world. "Their work demonstrates a dedication to material expression and exquisite detailing across multiple scales, in addition to creating an intimate connection with the site," the jury wrote.

Shim was born in Kingston, Jamaica and emigrated to Canada in 1965. She met Sutcliffe, who had emigrated to Canada from England the year prior, in the early 1980s, when both of them were studying at the University of Waterloo. The duo founded Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in 1994, and have completed many significant projects throughout Ontario.

Shim began teaching at the University of Toronto in 1988. At the Daniels Faculty, she leads core design studios, advanced design studios, and elective courses.

"Brigitte's teaching really is the truest demonstration of linking practice and theory," says Donald Chong, a design principal at HDR who studied under Shim at the University of Toronto and later worked for Shim-Sutcliffe Architects. "It gave me and my generation hope that you could still believe in the idea, and in critical development, and in trying to pursue the very things that we were taught in school."

Top: Integral House. Bottom: Shim and Sutcliffe's Laneway House. Photos by James Dow.

Shim and Sutcliffe have received 15 Governor General's Medals for Architecture, as well as an American Institute of Architects National Honour Award, among many other prizes and accolades. In 2013, they were both awarded the Order of Canada. The firm is particularly well known for Integral House, a vast ravine residence in Toronto's Rosedale neighbourhood with a two-storey living room designed to accommodate musical performances.

The firm's other notable works include the Robertson Davies Library and St. Catherine's Chapel in Massey College, at the University of Toronto; the Corkin Gallery, in Toronto's Distillery District; a residence for Toronto's Sisters of Saint Joseph; and the Wong Dai Sin Temple, in Markham.

Shim and Robert Levit examine student models during final reviews in fall 2019. Photo by Harry Choi.

"Having known Brigitte and Howard for 40 years and having observed their remarkable careers unfold, this special recognition from the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada is both thrilling and fitting," says Larry Wayne Richards, former dean of the Daniels Faculty. "As well, it is a moment to reflect on Professor Shim’s decades of dedicated teaching in the Daniels Faculty. In her design studio courses, Brigitte frequently engaged topics and research that were linked to the core interests of Shim-Sutcliffe Architects, such as laneway housing, the integration of architecture and landscape, and the development of cultural relevance."

Shim and Sutcliffe will receive their award at the 2021 edition of the RAIC's annual conference.

Each year, hundreds of student teams from across North America make submissions to the ULI Hines Student Competition, in which entrants are challenged to tackle a complex urban planning and design exercise. Only four teams advance to the competition's final round. This year, one of those teams includes two Daniels Faculty students: Ruotian Tan, a student in the Faculty's Master of Urban Design program, and Chenyi Xu, a Master of Architecture student.

Ruotian and Chenyi are working as part of a five-member, multidisciplinary crew. The other three students on the team are Frances-Grout Brown and Leorah Klein, both Ryerson University urban planning students, and Yanlin Zhou, a student in York University's Master of Real Estate and Infrastructure program. The group was supervised by Steven Webber and Victor Perez-Amado, both assistant professors at Ryerson's School of Urban and Regional Planning. Raymond Lee, a senior associate at Weston Williamson + Partners, and Christina Giannone, vice president of planning and development at Port Credit West Village Partners, acted as advisors.

The students will give their final presentation during a video call with the ULI Hines Student Competition jury on April 8. The competition's winning team receives a prize of $50,000. The three runner-up teams receive $10,000 each.

The competition is a rare opportunity for students to work with people in disciplines other than their own. "It was a great multidisciplinary learning experience for me," Ruotian says. "It was a very good chance for me to practice and get some good results before I actually go into a professional career."

The competition brief called for each student group to develop a detailed master plan for the East Village, a neighbourhood in Kansas City, Missouri. The East Village is a lightly developed 16.2-acre site located within the city's central business district. The student proposals had to take into account a wide variety of ambitious goals, including positive economic impact, sustainability, housing affordability, and easy access to transportation. In addition to redesigning the site, students had to produce implementation plans and financial pro formas that described exactly how their designs might be made into reality.

The Daniels Faculty/Ryerson/York team designed its master plan, titled "Fusion," around two central ideas: connectivity and resilience. Although the East Village is a relatively blank slate, with plenty of room for megaprojects, the group's plan doesn't contain any large tourist attractions, like stadiums or museums. "One thing that distinguished our proposal from the other finalists is that we wanted to create a community for people who are actually living there, rather than attracting tourists or visitors to the site," Ruotian says.

In the first phase of the group's three-step implementation plan, the city would build a new pedestrian promenade at the centre of the neighbourhood, then line it with the beginnings of a dense new urban neighbourhood. The plan calls for an initial 615 mixed-income rental units, a 107,000 square-foot community centre with some seniors housing inside, plus office space and ground-floor retail.

The group's site plan.

Over two subsequent phases of redevelopment, the neighbourhood would evolve into a continuous row of mixed-use housing, office, and retail structures. The community centre and an adjacent water-feature park would serve as gathering points not only for neighbourhood residents and workers, but also for other Kansas City residents, who would be channeled into the East Village by cross streets and bus routes parallel to the pedestrian promenade.

The "resilience" piece of the group's plan manifests in the form of a neighbourhood-wide network of green infrastructure aimed at allowing the site to gracefully accept rainwater. Permeable pavement would allow precipitation to seep into the ground. Street bioswales would collect rainwater for reuse. A series of rain gardens, community gardens, and green roofs would use stormwater for irrigation. And a vertical farming greenhouse would allow the neighbourhood to produce food at scale, in an environmentally friendly way.

The vertical farming greenhouse.

"Kansas City has a long history with agricultural industries," Leorah says. "We noticed to the east of the site, they have really strong community networks with urban agriculture, so we wanted to build on networks that were already existing and provide a place for them to build up their networks and build up their businesses. And COVID really showed the importance of a local food system."

Visit the ULI Americas website to learn more about this year's ULI Hines Student Competition finalists.

Aaron Hernandez (MLA 2019), Douglas Robb (MLA 2014), Thevishka Kanishkan (MLA 2019), and Rayna Syed (MLA 2018) — all graduates from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program — are among this year's recipients of grants from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation, a national charitable organization that invests in landscape research. Their newly funded projects will tackle a range of issues relevant to the contemporary profession. Here are some details.

Aaron Hernandez

Hernandez's LACF-funded project will be an extension of the work he began while he was preparing his Daniels Faculty thesis project. For that project, he used the tools of landscape architecture design to develop a new way of visualizing how policy documents dictate land use in Rouge National Urban Park, a protected area located in the northeastern corner of Toronto. Using his visualizations, Hernandez developed a series of site-specific remediation strategies that, he contended, could be used as the building blocks of a new and more ecologically sensitive regulatory regime.

Now, with $8,250 in funding from the the LACF's annual grants program and the LACF Donald Graham Bursary, Hernandez plans to perform even deeper policy research on land use in the Rouge. "The grant provides an opportunity to look at the Rouge in the context of a wider set of provincial policies," he says. "I'm also looking at this history of treaties with Indigenous peoples, and how they have formed settler perception and attitudes towards the landscape."

Image from Aaron Hernandez's MLA thesis project.

Hernandez will use part of the new funding to develop ways of disseminating his research. The grant will help him finish work on a paper he's writing with associate professor Jane Wolff, and he'll also begin developing a website to show his work to the public.

Douglas Robb

Robb's grant proposal is an outgrowth of his PhD work at the University of British Columbia's Department of Geography, where he's working on a dissertation about the ways landscape architecture intersects with changes in Canada's resource economy. "I'm looking at landscapes of decarbonization," he says. "How are designers implicated in building this energy transition that we're supposedly all moving towards?"

For his dissertation, Robb has been investigating the role played by architectural drawings in legitimizing controversial energy projects. As part of that project, he has been researching hydropower and hydraulic fracturing in British Columbia's Peace River region. With his $7,825 in funding from the LACF's annual grants program and the LACF Northern Research Bursary, he plans to accelerate his field work.

The W.A.C. Bennett Dam, a hydroelectric dam located on the Peace River. Photograph by Douglas Robb.

"I'm going to be driving the extent of the Peace River," he says. "I'll be documenting landscapes of energy extraction along the way and trying to tell a broader landscape narrative of the river in relation to energy transitions."

The new funding will also allow Robb to publicize his work through scholarly writing and a website. And it will support "Designing Canadian Energy Futures," an advanced undergraduate seminar that Robb is teaching this year at the Daniels Faculty. The money will allow him to provide guest speakers with honoraria.

Rayna Syed and Thevishka Kanishkan

Syed and Kaniskhan applied to the LACF on behalf of an organization they co-founded, Common Space Coalition. "The coalition was founded after a letter demanding action on the perpetuation of systemic racism in landscape architecture, signed by over 120 landscape architects across Canada, was sent in the wake of the killing of George Floyd to the OALA and CSLA," Kanishkan says. Common Space Coalition is now a registered non-profit.

With the $6,000 LACF grant, Common Space Coalition plans to develop the Common Space Directory, an interactive online platform that will catalog and map grassroots activism, community groups, and leaders who operate in fields adjacent to landscape architecture. "It's imperative to the resiliency of our work as landscape architects to meet community groups where they are at, and to bring them into projects at the earliest stages of design,” Kanishkan says. “Our hope is that the Common Space Directory will create a place for landscape architects to connect directly to the communities whose physical spaces we shape, ultimately leading to more equitable and sustainable design work.”

Syed and Kanishkan believe this new tool will help alleviate inequities in the way that landscape architecture manifests in the public realm. "This directory introduces community and activism as a layer of the site inventory and analysis process. It has the potential to break down the systemic racism and Eurocentric values inherent in Canadian landscape architecture, and start the design process with a bottom-up approach," Syed says. "The first step in that is amplifying community voices and grassroots organizations who are already doing this work, and paying attention to them in our profession."

The end result, Syed and Kanishkan say, will be an interactive map directory that shows the location and history of community leaders, groups, movements, and activists working in fields adjacent to landscape architecture in the Toronto area. The Common Space Directory website will also include video clips and notes from interviews and case studies.

The pair hope to promote this project at the CSLA Congress in 2021 and launch it completely by the end of the year.

Syed and Kaniskhan are hoping to raise an additional $4,000, to support the expansion of the project across a larger geographic area. For details, visit the Common Space Coalition website or Instagram.

Each year, the Landscape Architecture Foundation funds a series of research grants for use in producing case studies of landscape projects. This year, the international group of 10 grant recipients includes a familiar name: Kanwal Aftab, who earned her Master of Landscape Architecture at the Daniels Faculty in 2018 and is now a student in the Faculty's PhD program.

Aftab will use her LAF grant to study the University of Toronto Scarborough's Valley Land Trail, a 500-metre public trail, designed by Schollen & Company, that connects the campus with the adjacent Highland Creek Valley. Aftab will conduct her research under the supervision of Jen Hill, the Daniels Faculty's assistant dean of academic planning and governance. “I’m delighted that the Landscape Architecture Foundation supports our interest in this wonderful, universal-design project on one of our own campuses," Hill says.

Kanwal Aftab

Aftab's final product will be a case study brief. It will be published online as part of the LAF's Landscape Performance Series, a collection of scholarly evaluations of the environmental and social performance of various works of landscape architecture in locations around the world.

"This case study will examine a combination of social and environmental factors," Aftab says. "We'll be seeing how the trail was built out and how it's being used."

The case study's analysis, Aftab hopes, will help illuminate the way the trail, which opened to the public in 2019, has transformed U of T Scarborough's relationship to the nearby ravine. "I'm interested in looking at the placement of the campus within the larger community of Scarborough," she says. "COVID has been an interesting turning point because it has forced people to find more outdoor public spaces, like this one."

When she's not studying the Valley Land Trail, Aftab will be working on her PhD thesis, a history of the integration of systems thinking into landscape architecture pedagogy in the 1960s and 1970s.

Top image: The Valley Land Trail. Photograph courtesy of Schollen & Company.

The LA+ Creature competition presented entrants with an unusual design prompt: pick a nonhuman animal as a "client," and then use design methods to create something that might improve that animal's life.

Ambika Pharma, who graduated from the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program in 2020, and Niko Dellic, who is now completing his Master of Architecture thesis, took one of the competition's top prizes. Their winning design? An aquatic swingers' club for horseshoe crabs.

Their project, titled "Moonlight Orgies," is a modified barge that would float off the coast of Sagar Island, in India. The structure would contain an artificial habitat designed specifically to encourage mating by mangrove horseshoe crabs. Pharma and Dellic chose to focus on horseshoe crabs because of their importance to the medical industry. The crabs' blood contains a rare chemical that is essential for the production of certain kinds of pharmaceuticals and medical devices.

Ambika Pharma and Niko Dellic.

The project was one of five winning designs. Another recent Daniels graduate, Hillary DeWildt (MLA 2020), had her submission chosen for an honourable mention. The competition had a total of 258 entries.

"It's a relief when something like 'Moonlight Orgies' wins," Pharma says. "The project deals with a serious topic, but the design is peculiar. Our win means there's room for humour within ecology and design."

Rendering of Moonlight Orgies.

Pharma and Dellic's design is intended to create a space for mangrove horseshoe crabs to live and breed away from predators. The barge also corrals the crabs, keeping them within reach of humans, so that their blood can be harvested for pharmaceuticals. Allowing the crabs to be exploited by humans is, paradoxically enough, a way to keep them safe.

"Prior to their blood being discovered for medical use, their numbers were dwindling for the first time since the Jurassic period," Dellic says. "Suddenly, once they were discovered to have value from a human standpoint, their numbers started to go back up."

The reason horseshoe crab populations can benefit from human exploitation is that harvesting horseshoe crab blood doesn't always kill the animal. In most cases, a blood draw leaves the crab alive, but lethargic. "There's a two-week period where they're disoriented," Dellic says.

The barge is intended to act as a "crab paradise," where horseshoe crabs whose blood has recently been drained can relax in incubated wading pools. The pools are equipped with artificial lighting designed to emulate the precise kind of moonlight that is most conducive to horseshoe crab mating rituals. Once the crabs have recovered their strength, they can easily find partners and reproduce, benefitting both themselves and their human stewards.

The dark, moody style of the Moonlight Orgies project's renderings was intended to capture some of the moral ambiguity of this exchange of blood for species preservation. "It's not the most cheerful looking aesthetic," Pharma says. "I had some personal reservations about the trade-off we're proposing, between using a species as a resource and providing it with a habitat."

To find out more about the winners of LA+ Creature, visit the competition's website.

New Circadia (adventures in mental spelunking), the inaugural exhibition in the Daniels Faculty's Architecture and Design Gallery, has been named a recipient of a 2020 Best of Canada Award.

The Best of Canada Awards, given annually by Canadian Interiors magazine, recognize excellence in Canadian interior design projects of any size or budget. New Circadia was one of two winners in the "exhibit" category.

The New Circadia exhibition consisted of a 7,500-square-foot underground space, lined in soft, grey felt. Visitors were invited to drape their bodies with pillow-like "spelunking gear" and then lounge in the "Dark Zone," a dim, cave-like environment suffused with low, relaxing sound.

The project was curated and designed by former dean Richard Sommer, in partnership with Natalie Fizer and Emily Stevenson of Pillow Culture, a New York–based interdisciplinary design studio. They were inspired by the Mammoth Cave Experiment, a 1938 sleep experiment conducted by University of Chicago professor Nathaniel Kleitman. "We are interested in using architecture to convey the idea that idling and resting isn't unproductive," Sommer told U of T News.

New Circadia's soundscape was designed by assistant professor Mitchell Akiyama. Assistant professor Petros Babasikas and artist Chrissou Voulgari created Oneiroi, a space within the New Circadia exhibition where visitors could record descriptions of their dreams, or listen to dream descriptions recorded by others.

A number of special events took place inside the exhibition during its five-month run, including guest lectures, film screenings, and musical performances. New Circadia ended in mid-March, when the Daniels Building closed to the public at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

New Circadia wasn't the only Daniels-connected project to be honoured with a 2020 Best of Canada Award. Kohn Shnier Architects, co-founded by associate professor John Shnier, won in the "residence" category. Williamson Williamson Inc., co-founded by associate professor Shane Williamson, won in the "institutional" category.

Photograph by Bob Gundu.

Kohn Shnier Architects, which was co-founded by associate professor John Shnier, has been named a recipient of a 2020 Best of Canada Award for Wrap House, a home renovation project the firm completed in 2019.

The Best of Canada Awards recognize excellence in Canadian interior design projects of any size or budget, anywhere in the country. The awards are given annually by Canadian Interiors magazine.

The Wrap House project consisted of a total modernization of a mid-century home, located in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. Kohn Shnier Architects created a new front addition, clad in blackened wood, that wraps (hence the name) around the existing structure. Using the home's existing side-split typology, the designers totally revamped the interior volumes and added a new master suite. The new living spaces are characterized by material surfaces that reflect and energize the idea of a special family dwelling.

"Anticipation, reflection, and glimpsed views make for a home that is at once open yet discreet," Kohn Shnier writes in its description of the project. "This, coupled with the the cross-flow energies introduced through entry make an environment that is alive, yet calm."

To learn more about Wrap House and the other winners of the 2020 Best of Canada awards, visit the Canadian Interiors website.

Top image: Wrap House.

Sing Zixin Chen, a 2020 graduate of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program, is no stranger to accolades. She recently racked up another victory: one of her student projects received an honour award from the Society of American Registered Architects.

Sing's was one of six student designs recognized at the "honour" level (there is also a higher "excellence" level) of the the 2020 SARA National Design Awards, which are granted annually. She created her winning project for Longitudinal Landscapes: Memory, Medium, and Mobilization, a third-year option studio taught by Justine Holzman.

Sing Zixin Chen.

Students in Holzman's option studio studied the Los Angeles River, a once-natural waterway that now flows through Los Angeles in a manmade concrete channel. For their final projects, students developed proposals for redesigning the river, taking into consideration a real-world revitalization effort that is being led by the Army Corps of Engineers. The studio made a (pre-COVID) class trip to Los Angeles to view the site in person.

Sing approached the problem by thinking about the site's various users, both human and animal. Her project introduces a series of interventions designed to replicate the type of underwater environment that would be found in a natural river. At the same time, she widens the water channel to create space for human enjoyment.

Renderings of Sing's winning design.

The design creates different kinds of underwater habitats by manipulating the speed and direction of the river's flow. Tight curves and strategically placed underwater boulders and logs are intended to slow down the water, allowing the river to deposit sediment and form pools where fish can live. Shallower curves allow the water to speed up, creating areas ideal for recreational boating and other human activities. Along the river's banks, Sing envisioned a network of public amenities, including fishing platforms and parks.

"The naturalization of the Los Angeles River has been the subject of design and engineering exploration for over two decades," says Liat Margolis, director of the Daniels Faculty's Master of Landscape Architecture program. "The SARA jury recognized that Sing's proposal offers a new possibility of braiding concrete and riparian vegetation to reconcile the extreme conditions of deluge, drought, and restoring the river's life."

The SARA award has been a confidence booster for Sing, who is now working her first job in the profession, as a landscape designer at SvN Architects + Planners. "I was really happy and honoured to win this award," she says. "This was one of my favourite school projects. I enjoyed it and the design studio. And having the chance to travel to Los Angeles was a fun and memorable experience."

Noor Alkhalili, a third-year Master of Architecture student at the Daniels Faculty, was singled out for a rare honour late last month. The Ontario Building Envelope Council named her as the recipient of its 2020 OBEC Graduate Research Scholarship.

OBEC, a group that connects professionals from architecture, engineering, construction, and related fields, awards the $1,000 scholarship annually to one graduate student. Recipients must have a record of academic achievement, and they also need to be pursuing research related to building science.

Alkhalili was presented with a framed certificate at a socially distanced award ceremony in November. She says the scholarship is both a personal honour and a reminder that the discipline of building science is becoming more important at Daniels. "I was really happy to have received this scholarship, especially considering that building science is still an emerging topic," she says. "It's not recognized as much as it needs to be, but it is a very important topic in architecture."

Alkhalili has spent her entire graduate career performing building science research. In her first year at Daniels, she worked with professor Ted Kesik on a conference paper about metrics for visual privacy in buildings. She has continued that work, and is now preparing to co-publish a journal article on the topic with Kesik and Terri Peters, an assistant professor at Ryerson University.

In 2019, Alkhalili and fellow MArch student Jing Li co-founded the Daniels Faculty's OBEC student chapter. And Alkhalili has been a TA in several building science courses at Daniels.

"Noor is a gifted student, a dedicated teaching assistant, and a tireless research assistant," Kesik says. "Soon she will graduate and become a valued colleague. Her journey at Daniels is a testament to the dreams that become reality when the hard work of our students is generously sponsored by scholarships and bursaries."

Top image: Noor Alkhalili.