Iker Gil has been the executive director of the SOM Foundation since 2019. He is the founding partner of MAS Studio and founder of the nonprofit MAS Context. Gil has edited or coedited several books, including Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio and Shanghai Transforming. He has curated multiple exhibitions, including Nocturnal Landscapes, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac, and BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. He was cocurator of Exhibit Columbus 2020–2021 and associate curator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. He was the 2024 Victor A. Morgenstern Family Visiting Chair in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) along with architect Michel Rojkind. He has also previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Escola da Cidade (São Paulo). Gil has been selected as one of “Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century” by a jury composed by Stanley Tigerman, Jeanne Gang, Qingyun Ma, and Marion Weiss, named New Progressive by Architect Magazine, and included in the Hall of Fame in Newcity’s annual Design 50.

Leo Chow is a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)’s San Francisco studio, where he leads signature residential and office and mixed-use towers, master plans, headquarters, and adaptive reuse projects across the United States and China. Chow has maintained a deep commitment to educating the next generation of architects, co-creating the SOM Integrated Design Studio, an architecture and structural engineering studio focused on tall building design that has been taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the California College of Art, and Stanford University. He serves on the Design Review Board of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and has previously served on the Board of San Francisco Heritage and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Scott Duncan is a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)’s Chicago studio, where he leads the design of a diverse range of projects around the world. His work spans typologies, including high-rises, mixed-use developments, cultural institutions, aviation, and manufacturing facilities, among others. A global expert on tall buildings, Duncan serves on the Board of Trustees for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and leads flagship studios at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) for the first multidisciplinary advanced degree program focused specifically on high-rise buildings.

Laura Ettelman is a managing partner and member of the Executive Committee at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). Ettelman is an expert at leading large, technically complex projects with critical construction, phasing, and operational requirements while fostering a high level of collaboration. In 2020, Ettelman was one of two architects appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to New York City’s Advisory Council in the Construction and Real Estate Sector. She serves on SOM’s Executive Committee, where she is tasked with long-term strategic decision making and guiding efforts to increase equity in the firm and profession. As a mentor and a longtime leader of the SOM Women’s Initiative, she is deeply committed to training the next generation of women architects.

Kent Jackson is a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), where he leads designs across Europe out of the London studio, from Scandinavia’s tallest building to the first net-zero carbon district in Paris. He is a leading advocate of the firm’s pledge to meet the AIA 2030 Commitment toward a carbon-neutral built environment. Jackson is passionate about cross-sector collaborations to develop climate-positive solutions at scale and serves as a Global Ambassador for the World Green Building Council and was invited by the United Nations to speak at the Climate Change conference in 2022.

Vram Malek is a managing principal at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s New York office. In his role leading some of SOM’s largest and most complex projects in New York City and around the world, Malek manages multi-billion-dollar budgets, builds consensus among clients and stakeholders, and navigates regulatory agencies and comprehensive public approval processes. His work spans scales and typologies, from mixed-use projects and commercial supertall towers to rail stations, civic, and government buildings. The breadth of Malek’s experience is further demonstrated by his work in Asia Pacific, including the tallest buildings in Singapore and a net-zero-energy skyscraper in Manila.

Paola Aguirre is the founder of Borderless, an urban design and research practice based in Chicago. Aguirre has been trained as an architect and urban designer, and her professional experience includes working with government, universities, and architecture/urban design offices both in Mexico and the United States. She is also founder of Borderless Workshop, a research and collaborative platform focused on rethinking cities within the US–Mexico border region. On that front, she is the creator-producer of Mapeo Workshops that work with multiple universities and students from different programs to research, critically discuss, and creatively think about urban challenges using mapping as a main tool. She has been acknowledged by Next City Vanguard’s 40 Under 40 (2016), Impact Design Hub’s 40 Under 40 (2017), and Newcity Design 50: Who Shapes Chicago (2018).

Germane Barnes’s award-winning research and design practice, Studio Barnes, investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. Mining architecture’s social and political agency, he examines how the built environment influences black domesticity. Born in Chicago, Barnes received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Architecture from Woodbury University where he was awarded the Thesis Prize for his project “Symbiotic Territories: Architectural Investigations of Race, Identity, and Community.” Currently he is an assistant professor and the director of the Community, Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture, a testing ground for the physical and theoretical investigations of architecture’s social and political resiliency.

Monica Chada is founder and principal of Civic Projects Architecture, a Chicago-based practice with a social impact focus. Prior to starting her firm, she served as founding director of Impact Detroit and led project teams at Studio Gang and Ross Barney Architects, where she was integral to the design of award-winning, civic scale buildings. Her approach to design is highly participatory, going beyond architecture to engage in strategic planning, development, and revitalization. Civic Projects, a certified women owned and minority owned firm, is engaged in a wide variety of work, including museums, nonprofit community buildings, retail projects, and multi family residential work. Chada has also worked at Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for Research & Studies in Environmental Design as a Research Associate in the Office of Balkrishna Doshi, on the development of housing prototypes for low-income communities. Outside of Civic Projects, Chada is on the Board of Trustees of the Graham Foundation and has been an Adjunct Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology. She holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelors of Environmental Studies in Architecture from the University of Waterloo, Canada.

Leo Chow is a design partner at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM)’s San Francisco studio, where he leads signature residential and office and mixed-use towers, master plans, headquarters, and adaptive reuse projects across the United States and China. Chow has maintained a deep commitment to educating the next generation of architects, co-creating the SOM Integrated Design Studio, an architecture and structural engineering studio focused on tall building design that has been taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the California College of Art, and Stanford University. He serves on the Design Review Board of the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC), and has previously served on the Board of San Francisco Heritage and the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Chris Cornelius is a citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. He is the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design practice serving Indigenous clients. Cornelius was a collaborating designer with Antoine Predock on the Indian Community School of Milwaukee. Cornelius is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the inaugural Miller Prize from Exhibit Columbus, a 2018 Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award, and an artist residency from the National Museum of the American Indian. His work has been exhibited widely, including the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. Cornelius was the Spring 2021 Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University. Studio:indigenous received a 2021 Architect’s Newspaper Best Of Practice Award–Best Small Practice, Midwest.

Iker Gil has been the executive director of the SOM Foundation since 2019. He is the founding partner of MAS Studio and founder of the nonprofit MAS Context. Gil has edited or coedited several books, including Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio and Shanghai Transforming. He has curated multiple exhibitions, including Nocturnal Landscapes, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac, and BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. He was cocurator of Exhibit Columbus 2020–2021 and associate curator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. He was the 2024 Victor A. Morgenstern Family Visiting Chair in Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) along with architect Michel Rojkind. He has also previously taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Escola da Cidade (São Paulo). Gil has been selected as one of “Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century” by a jury composed by Stanley Tigerman, Jeanne Gang, Qingyun Ma, and Marion Weiss, named New Progressive by Architect Magazine, and included in the Hall of Fame in Newcity’s annual Design 50.

Jia Yi Gu is an architectural scholar, curator, and designer working on histories of knowledge production through the lens of media studies, cultural techniques, and material cultures (i.e. how we know and show our histories). She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvey Mudd College and one-half of the architecture and research studio Spinagu.

Joyce Hwang is an associate professor and director of Graduate Studies of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, and the founder of Ants of the Prairie, an office of architectural practice and research that focuses on confronting contemporary ecological conditions through creative means. She is a recipient of the Exhibit Columbus University Research Design Fellowship, the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and the MacDowell Fellowship. Hwang is on the Steering Committee for US Architects Declare and serves as a core organizer for Dark Matter University. She received a MArch degree from Princeton University and a BArch degree from Cornell University, where she was awarded the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Bronze Medal.

Ann Lui is an architect, partner at Future Firm, and assistant professor of practice at the University of Michigan. Previously, she practiced at SOM, Ann Beha Architects, and Morphosis Architects. Lui was cocurator of the US Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018 titled Dimensions of Citizenship. She coedited Public Space? Lost and Found (2015) and Log 54 “Coauthoring” (2022). Lui was recently named Newcity’s “Designer of the Moment” (2018) and Crain’s “40 Under 40” (2018). She holds an SMArchS from MIT and a BArch from Cornell University, where she was awarded the Charles Goodwin Sands Medal and the Clifton Beckwith Brown Memorial Medal.

Quilian Riano is the dean at Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture, working across the school’s architecture, landscape, and planning programs to develop and manage programmatic and pedagogical projects. Prior to this, he served as the associate director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC), where he provided strategy and design coordination for the CUDC’s urban design, applied research, publication, and academic activities. Riano has worked in and with public institutions, such as New York City’s Department of Design and Construction as a lead design strategist and the National Park Service as an urban design consultant. Riano is also the founder and lead designer of DSGN AGNC, a design studio exploring new forms of political design, processes, and engagements through architecture, urbanism, landscapes, and art.

Andrew Santa Lucia is a Cuban American designer, educator, and prison abolitionist based in Portland, Oregon. He is Associate Professor of Practice at Portland State University’s School of Architecture, where he teaches design studio, history/theory/criticism seminars, and is the graduate thesis coordinator. He has lectured and exhibited internationally, including Art Basel, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Santa Lucia’s writing can be found in a broad range of media from book chapters to academic journals to DIY zines. He runs Office Andorus, which designs architecture for activists, public institutions, and private clients with the goal of influencing public perception through the cultural instrument of architecture. His work is a hybrid of bold colors, graphics, and shapes used to translate, sharpen and amplify antifascist aesthetics and practices. He is currently co-writing a two volume book with historian and critic Daniel Joans-Roche, entitled Antifascist Architecture, which serves to locate architectural histories outside of capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries with a particular focus on the buildings and aesthetics associated with militancy, socialism, anarchism, and mutual aid.

Dawveed Scully is Managing Deputy Commissioner of Planning and Development at the City of Chicago. Trained as an architect and urbanist, Scully has a strong passion to make design an essential tool to enhance the lives of everyday people. He has experience working on a variety of projects from vision strategies that create a framework for execution to developing implementation strategies that allow those visions to be realized. Prior to joining the City of Chicago, Scully was an Associate Principal in the urban design and planning studio at SOM in Chicago where he worked for almost fourteen years on development around the world including that focus on housing, neighborhood and community planning, transit-oriented development plans, corridor plans, campus planning, inclusive placemaking and design equity. Scully is a graduate and currently an adjunct professor at IIT School of Architecture and featured in Crain’s Chicago Business 40 under 40 2020, ULI Young Visionary 2018, and Leadership Greater Chicago Class of 2021.

Stephen Slaughter is an accomplished architect, urban designer, and academic. He is currently the chair of undergraduate architecture in Pratt Institute’s School of Architecture in New York City. He earned both his Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The Ohio State University. His portfolio includes collaborations with practices around the world involving retail boutiques, residences, restaurants, and large-scale institutional projects. An ongoing emphasis of his work is to challenge conventional architectural orthodoxy, leading to his co-founding of PHAT, a four-person, multidisciplinary design collaborative that has exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Center for Architecture in New York, and the Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain’s Young Architects Exhibition in Orléans, France. Working with and for nonprofits like Watts House Project, Findlay Market, Youth Hope Cincinnati, and Elementz Hip Hop Cultural Art Center, he has foregrounded projects that champion diverse communities and improve the built environment through sustainable and conscientious design.

María Villalobos Hernandez is an assistant professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology and coordinator of the second year of the Master of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism program. She obtained her PhD at the School of Landscape Architecture of Versailles, France and a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. From 2005 to 2009, Villalobos worked for the recovery of Lower Manhattan after 9/11 at the New York Department of City Planning. She joined Arup to develop world-class public projects in New York, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro the following years. In 2017, she won the first prize in the Venezuelan Architecture Biennial for the rehabilitation of the Botanical Garden of Maracaibo, the first time that a landscape architecture entry and woman received this award. As cofounder of Artist Creator at Botanical City, Villalobos calls attention to preserving endangered cultural landscapes and performative research methods where practice and research co-occur. In 2020, Villalobos became a core member of Dark Matter University to advocate for antiracist design education and practice models. In 2021, Villalobos joined the inaugural Committee on Design for the Department of City Planning in Chicago.

Zoe Wang is a senior architect at the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Taiwan and a Master of Science in Advanced Architecture from Columbia University. Her diverse work experience spans multiple typologies, including urban design, religious buildings, hospitality, residential, commercial, and healthcare projects across Asia, the Middle East, and the United States. Several of the projects she worked on have been recognized in publications such as Wallpaper* magazine, A+ Awards, the Boston Globe. As a senior architect at SOM, she is passionate about designing spaces that emphasizes creating meaningful, poetic moments that leave a lasting impression, seamlessly blending functionality with emotional resonance.

Robert L. Wesley joined the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) in 1964 and became its first Black partner in 1984. During his nearly four decades with the office, he worked on an impressive range of civic, commercial, entertainment, master planning, and infrastructural projects in the United States and internationally, including Algeria, Australia, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom. As lead project administrator and liaison with clients, Wesley managed and coordinated the execution of several complex projects—working closely with the client’s representatives, the construction manager or general contractor, and special consultants to ensure each project’s successful completion. Wesley retired from SOM on September 30, 2001.