CADC Students Participate in AU Research Symposium

The Auburn University Student Research Symposium in Spring 2022 brought together hundreds of students and faculty from across the university to present research through oral and poster presentations. Eleven CADC students presented posters at the symposium with students from all three schools represented, including students from industrial design, building science, architecture, landscape architecture, and environmental design. An interdisciplinary team of judges reviewed all the presentations and selected the best posters in each category. Some of the topics presented by CADC students included design of assistive technology, integrated building security, use of literary museum space, urban development policies, HVAC systems and disease spread, and building restoration.

Undergraduate student presenters: Breck Bowen, Elizabeth Brandebourg, Kathryn Gafford, Ian Krohn, Aubrey Sanders, and Xilin Tang

Graduate student presenters: He-Fei Han, Muhammad Khan, Muhammad Umer, Whitney Brock, and Alex Wayland

The college undergraduate award winner was Ian Krohn, an environmental design student, for the presentation A tool for comparative analysis of prioritized building revitalization in urban America. Krohn’s research focused on building restoration projections using the Opelika historic district as a case study. Krohn created a rating system for building use using indicators such as building and sustainability standards, surrounding density, and social factors such as accessibility and historic relevance of space. Mapping those ratings across the downtown historic district, Krohn then provides recommendations for improvements to further growth.

The graduate award winner was Master of Building Construction student Whitney Brock for her poster, Effects of lighting color in a university testing environment. Brock has been working with McWhorter School of Building Science faculty member Keith Rahn on a CADC Seed Grant-funded project to examine the impact of lighting in classrooms. The research is still in progress and entails testing student outcomes in an assigned task while being exposed to an experimental set of lighting conditions in a classroom. The initial study group was small, but Brock hopes to expand on it in future studies.