Karen Kubey is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Toronto, specializing in housing design and spatial justice. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Her work focuses on SDG 11, including research and teaching on architecture and the right to housing and collaborations with UN Habitat.
Holding degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Kubey began her career as a designer of below-market housing. She has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts, MacDowell, and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and has completed a Fulbright U.S. Scholar fellowship in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Kubey has taught at Pratt Institute and Columbia GSAPP and was a 2019-20 Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon. She convenes the American Institute of Architects' Right to Housing Working Group.
J. Alstan Jakubiec is an assistant professor at the University of Toronto where he focuses his efforts on the design of the built environment with emphasis on wellbeing, comfort, environmental performance, and low-energy design strategies. He holds Bachelor’s (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Master’s (University of Pennsylvania) degrees in architecture and a PhD in Building Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Alstan specializes in building performance simulation (daylight, energy) and post-occupancy evaluations and environmental measurements. He believes that through data-driven processes, designers can create comfortable built environments that will support social interaction, require less energy, and last longer before being razed. Alstan co-creates the popular ClimateStudio and ALFA tools for calculating the daylighting and energy performance of buildings and actively develops new software tools as part of his research. He also co-founded Mapdwell, a technology company dedicated to providing information to homeowners about the renewable energy potential of their rooftops.
At U of T, Alstan publishes extensively on data-supported design through building performance simulation, environmental measurements, and subjective occupant experience. He teaches courses in building performance simulation, daylighting, multi-disciplinary sustainability issues, building lifecycle analysis, and urban sustainability. Alstan is the head of the Design for Climate and Comfort Lab, where he works with his students to improve the comfort, wellbeing, and energy efficiency of buildings and urban areas through data-driven processes. Alstan also runs the Spectral Materials Database, a web-database to enhance realism and accuracy in lighting simulations. He is a member of the Wellbeing in the Built Environment research group at U of T where he collaborates on integrating social practice and environmental quality on improving the built environment for human participants, serves as a voting member on the Illuminating Engineering Society’s Daylight Metrics Committee, and is currently a guest editor for Lighting Research & Technology.
Sean Thomas is an internationally recognized expert in tree ecophysiology and forest carbon processes, and in recent years has pioneered the use of biochar in forest restoration applications. Dr. Thomas is one of the most prolific scholars in Canada in the area of forest ecology, with authorship of more than 200 scientific publications in the areas of tree biology, forest carbon dynamics, carbon sequestration, and biochar science. Current research also focuses on both forest restoration on highly impacted sites such as mine tailings, and on urban green infrastructure including work on urban forestry and green roofs. Dr. Thomas’ research and field experience includes boreal and temperate forests as well as tropical forests; he has extensive experience in field botany and natural history in forests globally. His extensive international work includes participation in global forest plot network initiatives such as the Smithsonian ForestGEO program and forestplots.net, and in ongoing forest monitoring and experimental studies in Canada, Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of Congo, Dominica, Ecuador and Malaysia.