Joon-Ho Choi, Ph.D.
Associate Dean of Research and Creative Work
Associate Professor of Building Science
Dr. Choi, Joon-Ho, is the Associate Dean for Research & Creative Work and an Associate Professor of Building Science in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. Prior to taking the position, he worked as an assistant professor in the Dept. of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Building Performance and Diagnostics at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Choi’s primary research interests are in the areas of advanced controls for high-performance buildings, bio-sensing controls in the built environment, smart building enclosure, passive building strategies, human-centered building environmental control, building systems integration, environmental sustainability, and comprehensive POE (post-occupancy evaluation), indoor environmental quality, and human health, and work productivity.
He is currently a technical committee member of American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), and is an active member of the International Society of Indoor Air Quality (ISIAQ), American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE), and Korean-American Scientists and Engineers Association (KSEA).
Faiza Moatasim, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Faiza Moatasim is Assistant Professor of Architecture, Urbanism and Urban Design at the USC School of Architecture. She specializes in history and theory of architecture and urban design, modern colonial and post-colonial architecture and urbanism, low-income housing and urban informality. Moatasim’s research explores how the agency of individuals and communities in shaping their urban built environments, using their personal resources and political connections, is integral to our understanding of the planning, functioning, and everyday lived experiences of cities around the world. Her research has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, Mellon Foundation, International Institute for Asian Studies, Teagle Foundation and Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies.
Moatasim’s book manuscript entitled, Elite and Ordinary Informalities: Formal-Informal City Making in Islamabad, compares the modalities of high- and low-end informal urban processes that have had a major impact on the routine functioning and long-term development of the high-modernist city. Moatasim’s work on urban informality has been featured in Urban Studies, “Entitled Urbanism: Elite informalities and the reimagining of a planned modernist city,” and Antipode, “Informality Materialized: Long-term Temporariness as a Mode of Informal Urbanism.”
Moatasim teaches courses on themes in modern and contemporary urbanism and architecture in cities around the world that explore the relationship between spatial design and human social development, and offer insights into pressing global challenges caused by urbanization such as social inequalities, political conflicts, and spatial disparities.
Scott Uriu
Adjunct Associate Professor
Design Principal & Partner, Baumgartner + Uriu
Uriu is an Adjunct Assistant Professor and teaches graduate and undergraduate architectural design at the University of Southern California. He has previously taught at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and Woodbury University. He has also lectured at the SCI-Arc; Nanjing Southeast University School of Architecture in China; the Architectural Society of Shanghai in Shanghai, China; the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA); the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; the Roy and Edna Disney California Arts Theater; and Woodbury University.
He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from California State Polytechnic Pomona in 1993 and studied at the Architectural Association in London, Diploma Unit 7 from 1992-1993.
Uriu worked as an architect at Gehry Partners for over 7 years. In 2005, he co-founded Baumgartner+Uriu, for which he is both Design Principal and Partner. Scott Uriu is a licensed architect and Baumgartner+Uriu is a full-service architecture firm that has worked on projects both nationwide and abroad. The architects’ work has comprised cultural locations (including museums, concert halls and exhibition spaces), educational and transportation facilities, master planning and urban design, offices and mixed-use developments, restaurants, and residential work.
Baumgartner+Uriu’s work was recently exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, California; at the FRAC center in Orleans, France; the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France; the 12th Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy; the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, the SCI-Arc Gallery, the Next Nest exhibition at SITE in Santa Fe, the Architecture and Design Museum (A+D) in Los Angeles; the 2011 AIA Emerging Professional exhibition in Washington D.C.; the Milan Stadtkrone 2030 Exhibition in Milan, Italy; the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria; at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design in Hollywood, California.
In 2017, Baumgartner+Uriu received the AIA-Next LA Award, and in 2016 the Blueprint Award for Best Design Innovative Project. Uriu was recognized as a City of Los Angeles Master Artist in 2015, received a Graham Grant in 2014, along with the Maxine Frankel Award for design research (2010), the AIA national award for emerging professionals (2011) and the A+Award for Sustainability (2012).