SOM Foundation Announces Opening and Jury for the 2026 Research Prize

Phillip Bernstein is deputy dean and professor in the practice at the Yale School of Architecture, where he has taught since 1989. He teaches professional practice, project delivery, and technology, including the course “Scales of Intelligence: AI, Agency, and Architecture.” He was previously a vice president at Autodesk, responsible for the company’s vision and strategy for architecture, engineering, and construction, including the development of the Revit platform for building information modeling. Before Autodesk, he was an associate principal at Cesar Pelli & Associates, where he managed projects for Reagan National Airport, the Mayo Clinic, UCLA, and Goldman Sachs. He is the author of Machine Learning: Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (RIBA Publishing, 2022; second edition, 2025) and Architecture | Design | Data: Practice Competency in the Era of Computation (Birkhäuser, 2018). Bernstein is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and received the 2026 ACSA Distinguished Professor Award. He holds a BA and an MArch from Yale.

Shane Burger is chief design technology officer at SOM, where he leads the firm’s global Design Technology team from New York. He has developed computational design methods for architecture, engineering, and construction since the early 2000s. Before joining SOM, he was principal and global leader of technical innovation at Woods Bagot. Earlier, as head of design technology at Grimshaw, he set up the firm’s first projects using building information modeling and applied computational methods to geometry, analysis, and fabrication on arts and cultural buildings. He directed the nonprofit Smartgeometry for eight years. Burger is a member of the AIA Large Firm Roundtable CTO/CIO group and an advisor to the Autodesk Architecture Executive Council, and he gave the keynote “The 21st Century Architect” at the 2023 AIA National Conference. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Cincinnati.

Charlie Catlett is a senior computer scientist at Argonne National Laboratory and a visiting senior scientist in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. He is the founding director of the Trillion Parameter Consortium, launched at Argonne in 2023 to bring together teams building large-scale generative AI models for science. The consortium now includes more than 100 national laboratories, universities, research institutes, and companies. His research on cities includes the Array of Things, an experimental sensor network in Chicago, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology report Technology and the Future of Cities (2016). Catlett served as Argonne’s chief information officer from 2007 to 2011 and directed the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid from 2004 to 2007. He co-founded and chaired the Global Grid Forum. In 1985 he joined the original team at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois, where he worked on the NSFNET backbone and later served as chief technology officer.

Liam Young is an Australian-born architect and film director based in Los Angeles, where he coordinates the MS Program in Fiction and Entertainment at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). He founded the think tank Tomorrows Thoughts Today and co-runs the research studio Unknown Fields Division. His films use fiction to examine the technologies and infrastructure that shape cities. They include In the Robot Skies (2016), shot with autonomous drones; Where the City Can’t See (2016), shot entirely with lidar scanners; Planet City, commissioned for the 2020 NGV Triennial and premiered at Tribeca in 2022; and The Great Endeavor, which premiered at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. He produced the BAFTA-nominated documentary Consumed and was a visual consultant on Apple’s Swan Song. His books include Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City. His work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the V&A. He has held guest professorships at Princeton, MIT, and Cambridge, and has taught at the Architectural Association.

Peter MacKeith is executive director of the SOM Foundation since 2026, coming as a nationally recognized design educator, administrator, curator, and author. Most recently, he served as Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas from 2014 until earlier this year. In this role he helped to expand student outcomes, research funding, and facilities, notably guiding the design and construction of the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation, designed by Pritzker Prize recipients Grafton Architects and Modus Studio. In 2025, MacKeith served as the Lead Commissioner for the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, celebrating contemporary American design under the theme of PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity in collaboration with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and independent consultancy DesignConnects.