Join us for the second Food for Thought event of the season featuring Alpha Yacob Arsano (Architecture) and Catherine Lambert (Communication Studies). Each Faculty member will share a short presentation about their research and lunch will be served! All faculty, staff, and students are welcome. No RSVP required.

Alpha Yacob Arsano is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and a building scientist at Northeastern University. Arsano’s research explores strategies to maximize low-carbon, equitable bioclimatic building strategies under current and future climatic conditions to maintain occupants’ comfort and health. She has been developing early-design stage analytical mythologies that can be combined with large-scale datasets on the building stock of the majority world where the highest population increase is anticipated. The goal is to identify design and technology solutions for vulnerable communities affected by global warming. Arsano developed a digital design tool, ClimaPlus, to promote building design that integrates bioclimatic strategies with technology to reduce carbon emissions in pursuit of a more sustainable and healthier environment. In an effort to make sustainable building design education accessible to a larger audience across the globe, the web-app has been used in a MOOC course on edX with over 50,000 learners from more than 170 counties. Arsano earned a SMArchS and a Ph.D. in building technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she was a Presidential Fellow and recipient of the TODA Award. Her research work has been funded by the TATA Foundation and the MIT Energy Initiative. Before joining MIT, Arsano was an academic fellow at Transsolar Energietechnik, a climate engineering consultancy in Stuttgart, Germany, and interned at the architectural firm Allmann Sattler Wappner in Munich.

Catherine Lambert is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, researching science, risk, and environmental communication. Her work investigates the relationships between people and their environments, and how these place-based relationships influence responses to environmental and technological change. In contexts ranging from renewable energy acceptance, to natural hazards and social media, to responses to climate change hazards in underserved communities, her work identifies drivers of public concern and risk-related behaviors in order to inform strategic communication and public engagement efforts. In her research on deep geothermal energy development, she investigates how legacies of past extractive industries, visions of energy futures, and narratives of “the underworld” influence responses to subterranean technologies.

As part of this work, she cofounded the GEOHUB collaboration between Cornell University, King’s College London, Edinburgh University, and Sterling University, investigating policy and engagement challenges in geothermal development. Before joining the faculty at Northeastern, Dr. Lambert served as a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. She has a PhD in Communication and a Masters in Geology from Cornell, along with a BS in Geology and BA in Creative Writing from the University of Rochester. Her work has been supported by awards including an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.