CADC Seed Grants

These funds serve to advance faculty work that has the potential to secure external funding or yield visibility to the faculty and college through resulting work, including publications, exhibitions and fellowships. The application cycle typically opens in late Fall.

2026 Awardees

Giulia Amoresano
The Architecture of Malaria: from Southern Italy to the Global South

This research examines architecture’s role in creating an international model of productivity that, by exterminating mosquitoes, sought to modernize agricultural land, practices and people across multiple Souths, including Southern Italy and the Southern United States. The project will consist of a body of archival research conducted in Rome and New York City, leading to a peer-reviewed article solicited for publication and the first installment of a book proposal.

Benjamin Bush + Mindy Walden
Designing Mentorship: Investigating Professional-Student Collaboration in Industrial Design Education

This project examines Auburn’s Industrial Design (INDD) Mentorship Program to strengthen connections between students and alumni and identify what makes mentorship effective. By studying successful models at Auburn University and peer institutions, the research team will create an open-access Mentorship Playbook – a toolkit other design programs can adopt to build similar communities of support. This project aims to make mentorship a defining part of the Auburn design experience and a model for design education nationwide.

Jake Elbrecht + Wesley Collins
Developing an Agentic AI System for Mass Timber Design and Construction

This research will focus on the initial data collection and development of a theoretical framework for a mass timber conceptual design tool that uses natural language processing to automate portions of the design process. This Seed Grant will be leveraged to collect, sort, and synthesize documentation related to mass timber design and construction. The goal is to help bridge the experience gap between designers and contractors, thereby facilitating early design solutions to promote mass timber construction.

Eilís Finnegan + J. Collin Garnett
Memetic Armatures for Archival Access

Archives collect historical documents, records, and artifacts as a means of preserving information deemed critical and important to cultural narratives. Traditional typologies for archival practices trend towards reserved access and inaccessible valuation criteria as means of control and curation. This project imagines strange outposts – or “Archival Collection Points” (ACP) – set up at three Alabama festivals and cultural events chosen for their interactions between human and non-human actors. The collection points are designed to assemble localized ‘datasets’, primarily as a means of challenging the act of curation, access, and value; who curates and what is deemed worthy of memetic preservation?

Frank Hu + Julia Hedges 
Looking at the Landscape from Below: Scanning and Visualizing Manitou Cave

Underneath much of Alabama lies karst, a landscape formed by the fracturing and dissolving of limestone by water. Within karst, water works its way through cracks in the bedrock, hollowing out a vast underground drainage system, or in other words, a network of caves. The visual tools employed by landscape architects focus and reduce the landscape to mere surface. This research proposes to expand the discipline’s knowledge of the complexity of the sub-surface, using visualizations to understand the landscape as vertical, extending down into the earth. The research team will study Manitou Cave in Fort Payne, Alabama, listed as one of Alabama’s 2016 “Places in Peril.” This project will address the challenge of how landscape architecture can advocate for subsurface landscapes by communicating the geologic and historic importance of the cave to the public while mitigating risk to the cave itself.

Jeff Kim + Junshan Liu
Immersive Digitizing & Visualizing Built Environments in VR/AR: Infrastructure Development

This proposal aims to enhance Auburn University’s capacity for immersive visualization of complex built environments. Over the past several years, the research team has digitally documented a range of significant facilities, including NASA Marshall Space Flight Center structures and USS Alabama naval vessels, through Matterport, LiDAR scanning, and photogrammetry workflows. These extensive datasets now provide a robust foundation for exploring how immersive technologies, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality, can enhance understanding of spatial, structural, and historical information. The project outcomes will position the research team for future proposals focused on the digital preservation and interpretation of heritage and technical sites. In parallel, the findings will advance methods for as-built documentation, visualization, and data sharing among contemporary construction stakeholders.

Gloria Lau
Landscape of Care and Resilience: Community-Making in the Asian Diaspora

This project aims to document, unearth, and narrate the acts of community making in past and present Asian Diasporic communities in the United States. The research will utilize field visits to rural Asian diaspora communities, a typology that is understudied, to develop a new way of documenting placemaking practices and incorporating them into design methods and pedagogy. This work also fills the gap in scholarly work on cultural communities and placemaking practices in rural areas. New design methodology will be developed through comparative studies of rural with urban and suburban areas.

Ben Marshall + Alexander Adolf
CO2 Concentration in Job Trailers and Decision-Making Implications

CO₂ concentrations have been shown in different populations to decrease cognitive function and decision-making abilities. This project will use standardized testing to quantify CO₂’s impact on decision making of construction professionals in jobsite trailers around the Auburn and the Southeast area. The results will inform recommendations for optimal indoor air quality standards in construction trailers, potentially guiding future interventions to enhance worker health, safety, and productivity.

Adam Molinski + Julia Hedges
A Catalog and Showroom for Landscape Futures: Birmingham Vacant Lots Demonstration Project

This seed grant proposal seeks to begin research into alternative landscape strategies for this growing number of vacant lots in Birmingham. The aim is for these strategies to be economically, socially, and environmentally more sustainable. By designing these strategies, our goal will be to work with the community to find ways to reshape both the narrative and experience of these landscapes to benefit residents, reframing these spaces as places of possibility rather than emergency.

Verena Paepcke-Hjeltness
Visualizing Human Factors: A Collaborative Illustration Project

This project focuses on completing a series of illustrations for a contemporary book publication that re-imagines a classic human factors text.  The illustrations blend sketch notes, sequential imagery rendered in a sketchnote-inspired format, and more realistic figure drawings. This hybrid approach enhances the clarity and accessibility of complex content while maintaining visual consistency.

Kenneth Sands, Anoop Sattineni + Ayodele Fasoyinu
Feasibility of Commercially Available Wearables as a Safety Intervention for Construction Workers: A Pilot Investigation

This study aims to advance construction safety by investigating whether affordable, commercially available wearables (e.g., a consumer smartwatch) can reliably monitor heat stress compared to industrial-grade devices. The findings will guide contractors and safety managers in selecting practical tools to protect workers while informing OSHA and NIOSH efforts to address heat-related risks. Ultimately, the research promotes wider access to effective safety technologies and supports Auburn University’s mission to create intelligent, resilient solutions for the built environment.

Eric Wetzel, Alexander Adolf + Caleb Powell
Spotting Issues: An autonomous robot companion for punchlist creation

The punchlist phase of construction is essential for ensuring quality and completeness before project turnover. Current digital platforms utilize inefficient workflows: each punchlist item requires multiple steps, resulting in delays and administrative burden. This project proposes a human–robot collaboration system that automates punchlist generation, significantly reducing manual input and improving efficiency.

Jordan Young
Fabricated Assemblies Lab

This project will develop a design research lab that explores novel tools, techniques, and material systems to imagine alternative approaches for the built environment.  It positions making and experimentation as both a research method and a pedagogical framework for advancing architectural knowledge through direct engagement with materials, tools, and computational processes.