Sam Fox School Announces Tenure, Promotions

Penina Acayo Laker joined WashU in 2015. She focuses on design as integral to addressing systemic issues in public health and racial inequity in St. Louis and in global contexts. In 2021, Laker launched the Health Communication Design Studio (HCDS), a design collective and creative think tank addressing pressing public health issues. Laker and the HCDS have been co-investigators on projects with the Brown School’s Health Communication Research Laboratory that have received funding from the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control in support of equitable COVID-19 outcomes for racially diverse communities in St. Louis. Funded initiatives include iHeard St. Louis, the nation’s first health monitoring and response system which aims to build health knowledge in communities and trust in science; the COVID-19 Research Hub to increase participation among African Americans in COVID studies; and a range of materials designed to increase access to vaccinations and self-tests for vulnerable populations. Several of these projects have been recognized nationally by Graphic Design USA and Design Incubation. Laker has also published and spoken widely, most recently as the keynote speaker at the Sixth Workshop for Visualization in Communication in Melbourne, Australia. She is co-editor of The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression & Reflection (2022), an anthology of narratives from Black designers. The first book of its kind in the graphic design field, it has received critical acclaim, including being named one of the “Best Design Books of 2022” by Fast Company.

Laker teaches in the Sam Fox School’s communication design program and is the founding faculty member of the school’s creative practice for social change minor. She holds affiliate roles at the Institute for Public Health and Brown School’s International Center for Child Health and Development. She also regularly collaborates across the university, receiving awards from the McDonnell International Scholars Academy, the Africa Initiative, and the Divided City to support work around mental health stigma and public transit equity, among other projects.

Patty Heyda has been with WashU since 2002, and was appointed to the tenure track in 2010, and granted tenure in 2016. Her interdisciplinary research and teaching spans architecture and urban design, with extensions into the humanities. She explores the American city and design politics, with a focus on mapping and spatial justice in weak-market regions. Heyda is the author of three books and numerous projects and articles on the evolving metropolitan condition. Her books Rebuilding the American City (2016) and Rebuilding the American Town (2024), both with David Gamble (MIT), elaborate the complexities and creativity shaping urban design transformations in fifteen American cities and nine smaller metros, respectively. Heyda’s forthcoming Radical Atlas of Ferguson, USA (2024) charts the hidden systems of racial inequality in American first-ring suburbs, seen through the lens of North St. Louis County, Missouri, in over 100 maps. Heyda has been interviewed on NPR and for the documentary film The Kinloch Doc. Her public-facing work appears in CityLab, Fast Company, and Salon, among other outlets.

Heyda has practiced with the Pritzker Prize-winning firm Architectures Jean Nouvel in Paris and on large scale urban design projects with Chan Krieger Associates in Boston. Her independent design projects are published and recognized internationally. In 2022, Heyda was awarded the Dwight F. Davis Award for Outstanding Planning Advocate by the American Planning Association St. Louis. At WashU, she leads multiple Mellon Foundation–funded cross-disciplinary grants on the divided city and suburb. She served as interim chair of urban design in 2018 and is a founding member of the national Urban Design Academic Council, the first organization of its kind for urban design educators and professionals across the U.S.

Derek Hoeferlin joined Washington University in 2005. Since achieving tenure in 2017, Hoeferlin has had a robust period of research and creative activity that underscores his watershed expertise regionally, nationally, and internationally. His overarching design-research project, “Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture,” and his book of the same name — published in 2023 — utilizes the Mekong, Mississippi, and Rhine River basins as case studies to broadly consider how watersheds and water-based infrastructure affect design decisions, particularly related to climate change and infrastructural transformation. Hoeferlin’s work has also been published in peer-reviewed journals like The Anthropocene Review and the Journal of Architectural Education, and featured in the prestigious Exhibition Columbus as a 2020-21 University Design Research Fellow. He has spoken internationally on watershed architecture, including in Thailand, Laos, and the Netherlands.

Alongside his research and teaching in the Sam Fox School, Hoeferlin has continued to pursue built work and design competitions as a practicing architect and landscape and urban designer. He received First Prize in the 2017 Designing Resilience International Open Competition for his trans-boundary proposal for the Mekong watershed. As part of a finalist team in the 2018 Chouteau Greenway Competition in St. Louis, Hoeferlin received honors at the international level with an Architizer A+ Jury Award and Global Human Settlements Award and at the national level by the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the American Institute of Architects St. Louis, Central States, and New York Chapters. His project “Weathering St(ee)L House” in St. Louis earned him awards from AIA St. Louis, Design STL, and was nationally recognized in Dwell magazine and Design STL magazine. Among several other faculty committees and services across the university, Hoeferlin chaired both the landscape architecture and urban design programs in the Sam Fox School from 2019-2023 and continues to chair the landscape architecture program, where he has developed coursework in environmental justice and international collaborations.

Hongxi Yin joined Washington University in 2015 as associate professor in the International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy & Sustainability and achieved tenure in 2018, when he was appointed associate professor in the International Center for Energy Environment and Sustainability (InCEES). Yin’s research and teaching focus on radical building decarbonization.

His work on the 2018 Lotus House, an entry in the Solar Decathlon China competition, was widely covered in the media, at conferences, and in the Journal of Architectural Engineering, Technology Architecture & Design, and most recently, the Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering. This ambitious design-build project demonstrated a proof-of-concept pilot house using cutting-edge 3D-printing technology. Yin was part of a collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation exploring the development and performance of thermoelectric concrete that accelerated the development of new materials for decarbonizing buildings. He also led the effort for SMOOTH House, a partnership with WashU occupational therapy program that was part of the 2022-23 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Build Challenge to design a carbon-neutral, net-zero building that could monitor effectiveness of both passive strategies and smart building technologies.

Alongside his research, Yin has pioneered an approach to design-build education that provides students across architecture and engineering with applied opportunities. Yin directed the Solar Decathlon China 2013 competition as site operation manager and the 2018 competition as the director of the steering committee, after which the Asian Architecture Education Society formalized the design-build course and curriculum. He also initiated the Gateway Decathlon 2025 with Gateway South Entrepreneurs, which will bring together collegiate student teams from the U.S., China, and Europe to demonstrate their innovations and participate in a design-build competition near the Gateway Arch.