The GCA is pleased to welcome new team member, Aujean Lee, an assistant professor of Regional and City Planning. Lee earned her PhD from UCLA in the Department of Urban Planning, where she was also a research associate for the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Her research focuses on residential segregation and racial disparities in homeownership, wealth and community institutions. She also examines nonprofits in providing social protections to vulnerable communities in uncertain policy circumstances. One of Lee’s recent projects investigates the effects of ethnic neighborhoods on Latino and Asian housing choice and foreclosure outcomes. Her work has received support from several sources, including the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the UCLA Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Social Justice Award and the UCLA Institute on Inequality and Democracy. She was also nominated and awarded the Don T. Nakanishi Award for Outstanding Engaged Scholarship by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center. Her work has been published in several journals, including Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly, The International Indigenous Policy Journal, and Housing Policy Debate.
Dr. Lee plans to extend her dissertation to examine homeownership in ethnic neighborhoods across different U.S. metropolitan regions. While homeowners in middle-class Asian and Latino neighborhoods had lower odds of default and foreclosure in Los Angeles, this next project will assess housing market and demographic factors on foreclosures through a comparative analysis. She is also developing a project on nonprofit density in the Midwest and fiscal impacts after the 2016 Election due to changes in social service infrastructure and policies.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture professor and Institute for Quality Communities Director Dr. Amber N. Wiley’s book, Model Schools in the Model City: Race, Planning, and Education in the Nation’s Capital, has received two major honors from the Urban History Association.
Research initiated by Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture alumna Naila Hasan during her master’s studies at the University of Oklahoma has continued through faculty collaboration and resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in HERD: Health Environments Research & Design Journal.
Gibbs College of Architecture is pleased to announce Esther Thorp, Tyler Boydstun and Chukwuma Nwokoye as the winners of the 2026 Construction Innovation Translation Hub (CIThub) Student Ideas Competition.
