SOM Foundation Announces Jury for the 2024 Research Prize

Carson Chan is the inaugural Director of the Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and Natural Environment, and a Curator in the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design. He develops, leads, and implements the Ambasz Institute’s manifold research initiatives through a range of programs, including exhibitions, public lectures, conferences, seminars, and publications. Before joining MoMA in 2021, he worked as an architecture writer, curator, and educator. In 2006 he cofounded PROGRAM, a project space and residency program in Berlin that tested the disciplinary boundaries of architecture through exhibition making. Chan co-curated the 4th Marrakech Biennale in 2012, and the year after he served as Executive Curator of the Biennial of the Americas in Denver. He holds a bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell University and a master’s of design studies from Harvard Graduate School of Design. His doctoral research at Princeton University tracks the architecture of public aquariums in the postwar United States against the rise of environmentalism as a social and intellectual movement. He is a founding editor of Current: Collective for Architecture History and Environment, an online publishing and research platform that foregrounds the environment in the study of architecture history.

Carol Coletta is President and CEO of Memphis River Parks Partnership, a public-private partnership responsible for five miles of public property along the Mississippi River. She came to the Partnership on loan from The Kresge Foundation where she was Senior Fellow in the American Cities Practice. She led the foundation's initiative, Reimagining the Civic Commons, a national effort to demonstrate that transformative public spaces can connect people of all backgrounds, cultivate trust, create more resilient communities, and generate greater value in neighborhoods nearby. She previously served as VP of Community and National Initiatives for the Knight Foundation, a national foundation with deep local roots in twenty-six US cities. Coletta led the start-up of ArtPlace, a public-private collaboration to accelerate creative placemaking in communities across the US. She served as president/CEO of CEOs for Cities, a Chicago-based network of urban leaders from forty-five of the nation’s top metro areas. She also led the Mayors' Institute on City Design, a collaboration of the National Endowment for the Arts, US Conference of Mayors, and American Architectural Foundation to help mayors tackle their thorniest civic design challenges. Coletta created and hosted the public radio show, "Smart City."

Iker Gil (Chair) 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.

Alex Krieger is Professor in Practice of Urban Design, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1977. He served as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design (1998–2004, 2006–2007, 2019–2020), Director of the Urban Design Program (1990–2001), and as Associate Chair of the Department of Architecture (1984–1989). Krieger is also a principal at NBBJ, a global design practice. He was founding principal of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz until their merger with NBBJ in 2009. Since 1984, he has provided architecture, urban design, and urban planning services to a broad array of clients in numerous cities worldwide, focusing primarily on educational, institutional, healthcare, and public projects in complex urban settings. He is the author of City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Harvard University Press, 2019); Urban Design (with William Saunders, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Remaking the Urban Waterfront (with Bonnie Fisher et al., Urban Land Institute, 2004); Mapping Boston (with David Cobb and Amy Turner, MIT Press, 1999); Towns and Town-Making Principles (with Andrés Duany et al., Rizzoli, 1991); and A Design Primer for Cities and Towns (with Anne Mackin, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1989). He is the recipient of the 1988 SOM Foundation Architectural Educator Fellowship.

Shannon Nichol is a cofounder of GGN, a landscape architecture firm based in Seattle. She stewards GGN’s distinct approach to design and collaboration, bringing curiosity, humility, humor, and deep creativity to all their projects and the studio. Nichol’s designs—including San Francisco’s India Basin Waterfront Parks, the Lurie Garden in Chicago, and the Gates Foundation Campus—are widely recognized as distinct landforms and welcoming places embedded in local history, culture, and native ecologies. She is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (Seattle). She and her partners received the Smithsonian’s 2011 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture, and GGN received the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award. Nichol’s projects have been recognized with the ASLA National Awards of Excellence, ASLA and AIA Honor Awards, Tucker Design Awards, Great Places Awards from the Environmental Design Research Association, and Pacific Horticulture’s inaugural Design Futurist Award. Shannon has been engaged in a wide range of activities and Board positions around her longtime advocacy for considerate design, hand drawing, native plants, and walkable cities.