College of Architecture and Planning University of Colorado Denver

Nader Afzalan 
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Nader Afzalan's areas of interest include the utilization of social media as a tool to engage different voices in the planning process, youth empowerment, community development, and redevelopment of cultural landscapes. His current research focuses on empowering youth and children in the decision-making and visioning processes through utilization of online tools and virtual settings.

Mr. Afzalan holds Master's and Bachelor's degrees in Urban Planning from the University of Tehran. Prior to beginning his PhD studies at the University of Colorado, Nader was involved in various community development, urban revitalization and urban design projects in several Iranian historical towns. For nine years, as project director and urban planner, he focused on participatory planning and social mobilization in these towns. He has also conducted extensive research on documention and revitalization of traditional bazaars in affiliation with the Iran Cultural Heritage Organization and the Iran Ministry of Housing and Urban Development. Nader’s international and national publications and presentations are related to redevelopment of cultural landscapes as well as old towns. His last paper entitled "A study of Cultural Landscape as a Potential for Sustainable Development of Local Scale: Garme Village Redevelopment" was published in World Heritage and Cultural Diversity in December 2010.

Rebecca Colbert
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Rebecca Colbert is a licensed landscape architect who specializes in the development of outdoor environments for children. She is currently pursuing her PhD in Design and Planning at the University of Colorado where she serves as the managing editor of the Children Youth and Environments Journal and oversees the youth assessment component of the Growing Up Boulder initiative.

Ms. Colbert holds a Bachelor's degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master's degree in Urban Design from the University of Colorado. Upon completion of her bachelor's degree, Ms. Colbert was awarded the Geraldine Knight Scott Traveling Fellowship to examine innovative children's play environments throughout Europe.

Prior to relocating to Colorado to pursue her doctoral studies, Rebecca was employed as a landscape architect and project manager at the Berkeley, California design firm, Moore Iacofano and Goltsman, Inc. While in private practice, Ms. Colbert oversaw a range of large-scale development projects designed to serve the specialized needs of children, including public parks, children's museums, school grounds, children's zoos and therapeutic play environments.

Mary Frances De Rose
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Born in Denver, Mary Frances De Rose has over thirty years of experience in the arts and design. While completing her M.P.A. at UC Denver, she was a National Endowment for the Arts management fellow, a researcher for the Colorado Council on the Arts and Humanities, and a project manager at Denver's Commission on Cultural Affairs.

Mary Fran also completed a post-professional M.Arch.U.D. at UC Denver. She was managing editor for the APA journal, Urban Design & Preservation Quarterly and a researcher for Charles Bricker, editor of Elle Dcor. In 1993, she founded the VESTA Project, an interdisciplinary design service through which the homes of dementia patients are architecturally modified as a psychosociospatial intervention allowing families to age-in-place. To date, the VESTA teams have redesigned over 3,000 private residences. Her geriatric design protocols have been replicated internationally and she has lectured on the topic of environmental gerontology at the medical schools of Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Northwestern, and NYU. Additionally, she recently finished a multi-city study investigating 'senior age discrimination in rental housing' and has conducted 'aging-friendliness community audits' across the US and abroad. She is a principal in the evidence-based design practice DRMK/Sullivan+Partners in Oak Park, Illinois.

At CYE, Mary Fran will combine her longtime interest in elder design and her recent experience working with pre-K - 12 students on intergenerational projects that serve people of all ages.

Shawn Edmonds
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Debbie Flanders Cushing
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Debra Flanders Cushing is a PhD student in Design and Planning at CU. Her research areas include: involving diverse youth in the design of community environments; using youth-created digital stories as pathways to community engagement; and evaluating different formats for youth governance to create child- and youth-friendly communities. She has lived in Boulder for nine years.

Debra received her Bachelor's from Penn State and her Master's from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Landscape Architecture . She worked as a design practitioner, using participatory planning approaches to design community parks, trail systems, and outdoor learning environments and has extensive experience coordinating, implementing, and evaluating service learning courses and outreach projects connecting university students to the local community. Debra currently teaches an undergraduate course in the Environmental Design Program at CU Boulder," Immigrant Integration through Community Planning" and previously taught Sustainable Planning and Participatory Community Planning.

She received the 2009 Equity and Excellence Award from the Office of Diversity Equity and Community Engagement at CU Boulder for her work with diverse youth, including immigrants. The Institute for Ethical and Civic Engagement, CU Boulder, gave her the 2009 Annual Serving Communities Award for her work with service learning and community outreach.

Laura Malinin
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Laura Healey Malinin is a licensed architect and instructor in the College of Architecture and Planning at the University of Colorado where she is also pursuing a joint PhD in Cognitive Science and Design and Planning. Her areas of interest include cognitive studies of creativity and design processes; visual-spatial representation and reasoning; architecture and cognition, human/ social factors and the environment, and technology-supported environments for collaborative design/social creativity. Laura holds a MEd from the University of Texas and BA in Architecture/ Art and Art History from Rice University. Prior to working at the University of Colorado, she was a Design Architect/ Project Manager with two Houston architectural firms and has had her own practice since 1990. Laura previously taught at Houston Community College and the Art Institute of Houston and developed the curriculum for a public high school architectural program in Texas.

Tizai Mauto
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Tizai graduated from the University of Zimbabwe with a Bachelor of Science Honors degree in Rural and Urban Planning. His honors thesis examined the extent of youth participation in urban design and land development in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. After obtaining his honors degree, Tizai worked as a Town Planning Officer in the Department of Physical Planning of Zimbabwe. Whilst at the Department of Physical Planning, he was a leading planner in several urban and rural development projects in which over five thousand housing, commercial, industrial and institutional properties were planned, designed and approved for construction. In the Fall of 2007, Tizai resigned from his planning job to join the PhD program in Design and Planning in the College of Architecture and Planning.

His current research interests include youth participation in urban planning and design, livelihoods of urban youth in informal urban economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, and urban agriculture and sustainable urban development in southern Africa. As a PhD student, Tizai has been a teaching assistant for Urbanization in Developing Countries, Environment and Behavior and Introduction to Environmental Design. He has also worked as a research assistant, analyzing youth voices for Denver's Child- and Youth-Friendly City Initiative as well as the a Boulder youth nightlife survey.

Nicole McDermid
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Nicole McDermid’s interests relate to family-friendly community planning. She is specifically concerned with residential choice theory behind. Nicole graduated with a Bachelor’s in Interior Design from the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. She also built her own company, consulting as a commercial and residential designer. Community involvement in Indianapolis led her to pursue a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning (Ball State University, 2011), where her thesis focused on family-friendly planning techniques.

Nicole taught interior design courses at Ivy Tech Community College in Columbus, Indiana, where she developed an enthusiasm for teaching. Her love of education, coupled with her interest in research, led to the PhD Program in Design and Planning at the University of Colorado and work with the Children, Youth and Environments Center for Research and Design. As a first-year student Nicole works as a Teaching Assistant for an undergraduate course in research methods.

Annie Miller
Doctoral Student in Political Science

Annie Miller received a master’s degree and formerly served as the Director of Civic Engagement at Miami University Hamilton, Ohio, where she helped embed engaged scholarship in tenure and promotion criteria and assisted faculty in establishing mutually beneficial community relationships that enhanced scholarly work and produced community gains in the form of grants, human resources, and stronger networks. Annie also founded Hamilton’s Underground Buzz, a young adult organization to restore green space in the urban core and foster public, multi-generational leadership. She is currently a PhD student in political science at the University of Colorado, Boulder and continues work with the American Democracy Project and Next Generation Engagement Scholars across the country.

Selena R. Paulsen
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Selena R. Paulsen is a second year PhD student in Design and Planning. Her focus is the design of public spaces for children, in particular schools, parks, and playgrounds. She is currently working on the design of a study of school location and design as it relates to sense of community. Selena has a Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Colorado, a Master’s degree in Public Administration from the University of New Mexico, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP). She spent ten years working in both the private and public sectors as an urban planner specializing in long-range comprehensive community planning and participatory planning. In 2008 she was a co-presenter of a session on Designing Child-friendly Neighborhoods at the International Livable Cities conference with Dr. Louise Chawla, and in 2009 she co-authored the report, Public Policies for Intergenerational Cities: Background Trends and a Case Study of Denver, Colorado with Dr. Willem vanVliet.

Illène Pevec
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Illène Pevec facilitates children and youth to develop gardens. She investigates the sensory and emotional responses of adolescents to gardening and the influence of gardening on their eating habits, ability to focus and environmental attitudes.

In 1998 in Vancouver, BC Illène began her work in this field by initiating a large school and community garden at Grandview Elementary. This participatory action research project served as the learning grounds for her MA thesis in Curriculum Studies at the University of British Columbia in 2000. The garden and programs have won national and regional awards for creating healthy environments for children.

In 2001, Illène founded and continues to direct A Child’s Garden of Peace, a community development project in Santo Ângelo, RS, Brazil based in school and community gardens, recycling and micro-enterprise.

With a CU Boulder Outreach grant Illène currently assists Yampah Mountain High school with their horticultural program and Roaring Fork High School in Carbondale, CO to establish a large greenhouse and organic farming program.

Doug Ragan
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Doug Ragan is a fourth year PhD student in Design and Planning. He has worked in the NGO and government sectors on research, policy and programming with and on urban youth. As Senior Manager of the Environmental Youth Alliance in Vancouver, from 1991 - 2007, he coordinated international research and policy programs with the United Nations. Currently he is Project Manager for Research and Analysis with UN-HABITAT.

Doug’s research interests focus on youth and youth-led agencies in the developing world. He is researching factors that make youth-led agencies successful in affecting positive change in local communities. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya with his wife Lee-Anne, and sons Jeremy and Liam.

Alessandro Rigolon
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Alessandro Rigolon is a PhD student in Design and Planning at the University of Colorado. His research interests include the design of children’s environments as a means to foster the development of ecological literacy, as well as processes of designing with children. His research at CU focuses on child-friendly sustainable urban neighborhoods.

Alessandro received his bachelor and master degrees in architecture from the University of Bologna, Italy. He is a licensed architect and building engineer in Italy. Working for four years in architectural firms in Italy, he designed educational, residential and sport buildings. He has also worked for the University of Bologna as a part-time lecturer, studio instructor and research assistant. His publications address influences of child development knowledge on the design of schools and participatory design processes with children.

Yucel Severcan
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Yucel Severcan graduated from Middle East Technical University with a bachelor’s degree from City and Regional Planning and a master’s degree from Urban Design. In 2006, he finalized his master’s study with a dissertation on regeneration of industrial landscapes. After working as a planner and architect for several years, Yucel continued his academic studies as PhD student at the College of Architecture and Planning, University of Colorado. Yucel’s current research interests include children’s perception and use of public spaces, privatization of the public realm, urban regeneration, and healthy community development. In the past years, he was a section instructor in Introduction to Environmental Design, and Design and Media. With his advisor Fahriye Sancar, he was involved in several research projects that targeted children, youth and their environments in Turkey, and physical activity master plans in Colorado. Since 2006, Yucel C. Severcan has been continuing his education in the PhD Program in Planning and Design, as well as working as a Teaching and Research Assistant.

Corrie Colvin Williams
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

Corrie Colvin Williams is a PhD student in the Design and Planning program. Her primary research interest lies in child-nature interaction as it relates to child well-being and sustainable communities, particularly through schools and place-based education. Corrie received a B.A. in Geography from The University of Texas at Austin in 2005 with an undergraduate thesis focused on human rights in Guatemala and received a Master of Applied Geography (M.A.G.) in Land-Area Development and Management from Texas State University-San Marcos in 2007 with a thesis on land trust and private landowner interaction. Before coming to Colorado, Corrie worked as an environmental consultant in Austin, Texas and remained involved with the Texas land trust community and Campfire USA Balcones Council, a program designed around youth development through nature interaction.

Corrie has developed and taught "Integrating Community Preferences in Environmental Design" for undergraduates in spring 2010. She is currently a research assistant for the CYE Growing Up Boulder project and in fall 2010 will be assisting in the Teach for Sustainability program, a course supported by the CU Environmental Center.

Bambi Yost
Doctoral Student in Design and Planning

RECENT GRADUATES

Kelly Draper Zuniga
Recent Graduate of the PhD Program in Design and Planning

After successfully defending her dissertation in the spring of 2010, Kelly accepted a tenure-track appointment at Queensland University of Technology, Australia, where she intends to extend her research on safe routes to school.

George Awuor
Recent Graduate of the PhD Program in Design and Planning

George graduated in 2008 with a dissertation on a qualitative assessment of a youth-led environmental clean-up program in the slums of Nairobi (Mathare Youth Sports Association). He is currently a policy analyst at The Bell Policy Center, a non-profit research and advocacy group based in Denver, Colorado. His focus at The Bell includes fiscal reform and how public policy affects working poor families in Colorado.

Susan Strife
Recent Graduate of the PhD Program in Design and Planning

Since graduating from CU Environmental Studies doctoral program in 2009, Susie has kept busy in the Boulder County Commissioners' Office, managing its energy efficiency and sustainability programs as Boulder County's Sustainability Coordinator. She also continues to teach in the University of Colorado's Teach for Sustainability program.

Emily Love
Recent Graduate of the PhD program in the School of Education

Emily Wexler Love graduated in 2010 with a PhD in the School of Education, where she focused her research and teaching interests on immigrant education and education policy. Her writing has examined youth engagement in protest related to immigrant issues; state level special education response to intervention (RtI) initiatives; she also authored a chapter about the DREAM Act in Current Issues in Educational Policy and the Law (2008). During her doctorate work at the University of Colorado Boulder she has co-instructed three service-learning courses bridging the disciplines of education and community planning. She also co-created Youth FACE IT (Fostering Active Community Engagement for Integration and Transformation), a program that used multimedia methods to engage youth in critically examining their environment to develop recommendations for a more inclusive community. She received her B.A. in Spanish and English from Tulane University in New Orleans. After attending university in Valparaíso, Chile and Guadalajara, Mexico she worked for an educational nonprofit in the Bay Area where she created and administered GirlForward, a program designed to increase adolescent girls' self esteem through community engagement and dialogue activities. She currently works at the OMNI Institute, a social science research firm in Denver. She remains interested in interdisciplinary projects and working closely with her local community on immigrant integration.