Meet CED Alums

Punk legend Kamala Parks’s day job is as a transportation planner with BART: “When you’re a punk, you love efficiency, sustainability, democracy,” she said. “Transit fulfills all these things.” She graduated from UC Berkeley in 2005 with an MS in Civil Engineering and a Master of City Planning from the College of Environmental Design.

The Department of Architecture welcomes Diana J. S. Martinez (BA Architecture 2001), a scholar of the architecture of U.S. empire with a focus on the Philippines, to the faculty as assistant professor in architectural history and theory.

The American Society of Landscape Architects honored Maria Fernanda “MaFe” Gonzalez (MLA 2022) with its 2025 Emerging Professional Medal. Selected by ASLA’s Board of Trustees, the medal is one of the highest honors the ASLA bestows each year.

CED alum Bob Grether’s career exemplifies the transformative power of design and strategic development — and the outsize impact one person can have on a community. Bob ((BArch 1969, MArch 1973) and his wife, Katy, recently made a $200,000 gift to the Bauer Wurster Hall Renovation fund to upgrade a classroom used primarily by students in the Abbey Master of Real Estate Development + Design (MRED+D) program.

Designer, educator, researcher, and alum David Brown (MArch 1990) led this year’s competition, with the theme Lot, Garden, and Void. Student teams of five to six students had 58 hours to create their designs before presenting to a panel of jurors. Brown, professor of architecture and director of the College of Architecture at the University of Illinois – Chicago, is best known for The Available City, his ongoing initiative to document, explore, and reimagine vacant lots in Chicago as landscapes of collective action.