November 4, 2020

Elnaz Bailey and Haripriya Sathyanarayanan, architecture Ph.D. students and researchers at Professor Luisa's Caldas’ XR Lab, have recently been named recipients of multiple campus and  national awards. 
 

Together with Professor Caldas, Elnaz Bailey was one of the recipients of the CTO’s 2020 Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation Grants. The grant program provides financial incentives to unite individual ideas and excellence from across Berkeley's decentralized campus in order to foster connections and develop institutional awareness and support to expand positive impact. Berkeley Changemaker Technology Innovation Grants fund transformative ideas with real applications that benefit the Berkeley campus.

The winning project, InsightXR enables users to collaborate across different locations using AR, VR and MR technology. It provides users with implicit and explicit feedback information on their 3D models, namely on areas of a design project that elicit higher concentrations of focus and interest by others.

This information is ultimately used to inform the evolution of new design ideas. Bailey is developing this project as part of her doctoral dissertation, under the supervision of Luisa Caldas, director of the XR Lab. Elnaz Bailey holds an MDes from Harvard Graduate School of Design and has extensive consulting experience in building sustainability. She is also a recipient of the ASHRAE Golden Gate Chapter 2020 Student Scholarship.

Haripriya Sathyanarayanan is a recipient of the 2020 Robert J. Kain Healthcare Design Education Scholarship. Founded by AIA California's Healthcare Facilities Forum, the award supports architecture students interested in pursuing a career in the design and delivery of hospitals and healing environments. 

Priya is a 4th year Ph.D. student with an interdisciplinary research background bridging design, health and technology through a collaborative design approach for patient-centered innovations. As a consultant, Priya worked on several award-winning sustainable healthcare projects.

Her dissertation, "Immersive Virtual Environments for Patient-Centered Design in the Pediatric Healthcare Built Environment", also developed under the supervision of Luisa Caldas, uses virtual reality to engage with the pediatric patient population on spatial and environmental design of patient rooms, to understand the impact of the built environment on perception and experience. 

In September, Sathyanarayanan was also awarded The Beryl Institute's 2020 Patient Experience Research Grant for Scholars The grant supports a qualitative study included in her dissertation, focusing on room layout design in the inpatient department of a children's hospital, based on perceptions about the inpatient built environment and patient spaces. 

The study proposes to directly engage with children and parents during the hospitalization, hear their voices and perceptions on spatial and environmental design of the patient room to better understand how the physical environment meets their physical, psycho-social and emotional needs, as feedback for design.

The award involves a research report of findings to be published through The Beryl Institute and a presentation of findings at the Beryl Institute Patient Experience Conference.

Haripriya is also a recipient of the ASHRAE Eric Thor Andresen Memorial Scholarship 2020 award.