Jane Anderson is an architect and Professor at Oxford Brookes University. She is a National Teaching Fellow and Higher Education Academy Principal Fellow. She is a co-founder of the Live Projects Network. Her research is focused on the pedagogy of live project education.

Ursula Hartig is co-funder of cocoon-studio. Since march 2017 until October 2020 she held a professorship at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich. She became a research fellow at the Department of Architecture, TU Berlin in 1997. Since 2001 she has been a project manager and director of TU Berlin‘s DesignBuild Studios including planning, realisation and documentation of buildings and environments in Mexico and Afghanistan.  She holds a Master in Architecture (Diplom Ingenieur) from the Technische Universität Berlin. Hartig is funding member of the DBXCHANGE NETWORK

Ger Innovation Hub

Badruun Gardi is co-founder and chairman of GerHub, a nonprofit social innovation firm that aims to develop creative solutions to the most pressing issues facing the ger areas of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. GerHub collaborates with a wide range of stakeholders to research & develop innovative interventions and to nurture a new generation of creative problem solvers. Badruun currently serves on the boards of The Asia Foundation, Arts Council of Mongolia, Mongolia Education Initiative, and Smart Air Mongolia. He is an alumnus of the U.S. Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program and the inaugural class of the Asia Foundation Development Fellows program. Badruun holds a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Communication from Stanford University.

Ger Innovation Hub

Joshua Bolchover is an Associate Professor at The University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on sites that are in the process of becoming urban. He co-founded Rural Urban Framework with John Lin in 2005 with the remit to create a not-for-profit agency as a platform for design and research.

Ger Innovation Hub

Jersey Poon is an architect at Rural Urban Framework, and an Assistant Lecturer at The University of Hong Kong She has been working on projects in Mongolia since 2016 and was the project coordinator for the Ger Innovation Hub.

Fish River Rangers Accommodation

Joti Weijers-Coghlan: Joti leads the Design Construct Program at UniSA, an experiential learning program which teaches students through the design and construction of real projects in remote locations. Joti also teaches the final year construction studio in the Bachelor of Architectural Studies at UniSA. Joti’s research interests include the integration of practice-based learning within an academic context to provide tangible educational benefits to students within architecture, engineering and construction disciplines.

Fish River Rangers Accommodation

David Morris: David is an architect and builder, and the founding director of the student Design Construct program at the University of South Australia. David’s teaching and research is focused on climatically and culturally responsive architecture for remote communities in Australia and overseas. David’s specialises in passive solar building design, autonomous energy systems, waste water treatment systems, prefabricated construction and transportation, and cross cultural consultation aimed at improving built environment outcomes for remote Indigenous communities.

Imagine Castlegate

Carolyn Butterworth is a Senior University Teacher at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture in the UK. She is Director of Live Works, the School of Architecture’s high street urban room and project office. She also supervises Live Projects, a long-standing teaching programme where groups of masters students work with community clients to deliver real projects for the benefit of their local area. Her teaching specialises in arts-led community regeneration, co-production and live pedagogy.

Imagine Castlegate

Tom is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded PhD candidate at Sheffield School of Architecture. His research explores spatial educational practices between the university and the city and uses his practice with Live Works as a laboratory of experimentation for practice based research.

Dr. TAN Beng Kiang is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. As a strong advocate of participatory community design, she leads design studio and service learning projects in Singapore and Southeast Asia. Her teaching and research interests are in Participatory Community Design & Planning, Design for Aging and Sustainable Housing. She is a registered architect, serves on various advisory committees and a recipient of numerous design and teaching awards, including the Pacific Rim Award for Excellence in Public Interest Design 2018 for Smile Village project. She holds a Doctoral degree from Harvard University, MArch from UCLA and BArch (Honours) from National University of Singapore.

Ah Ma Drink Stall

Ethan is a Singaporean project architect with a focus on hospitality, residential and institutional projects. He is passionate about converging architecture-making and community development to create liveable spaces and shape a more socially resilient society.

Vertical University Project

Priyanka Bista is a Nepali-Canadian designer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of public interest design and biodiversity conservation. She’s the Co-Founder and Design Director of KTK-BELT studio, a non-profit based in New York that works collaboratively with local communities in Eastern Nepal to create the “Vertical University” project. For her work, she was selected as the Visiting Faculty fellow for the 2019 Design for Spatial Justice Initiative at the University of Oregon. And previous to Nepal, she was the Senior Architect and Planner working in informal settlements of Nigeria on the Human City Project. She has degrees in Architecture, International Architectural Regeneration and Development and Shelter after disaster.

Vertical University Project

Lokendra Bahadur Yakkha, a highly skilled farmer and local leader, is the Chairperson of Tamur Permaculture Learning Grounds, a partner organization and collaborator for the Vertical University project. He’s an indigenous leader of the vanishing Yakkha ethnic group of Nepal and has been a life-long advocate for the environment. Under his guidance and leadership, the organization has regenerated a drought ridden land parcel to turn into a Learning Grounds for organic and biointensive farming. As a farmer with immense passion for conservation and an interest in teaching this to the younger generation, he is truly one of the inspiring professors of Vertical University.

Vertical University Project

At age 22, Amrita is one of the youngest youth fellows currently engaged with the Koshi Tappu Learning Grounds, a partner organization and collaborator of the Vertical University project. She belongs to the Sardar caste group, an indigenous caste group, currently living within the buffer zone area of Koshi Tappu. Despite the socioeconomic and structural barriers, she is ambitious and wants to make a meaningful contribution towards her community. She really believes that youth, in particular, young women need to be empowered to lead community projects. The work of KTLG has made waves in demonstrating community-based conservation approaches in Koshi Tappu.

Vertical University Project

Ishita is the co-lead for the outdoor education program at the Vertical University project. Ishita is a talented illustrator and also an advocate for mental health. She incorporates graphic design and practical training in mental health youth advocacy in educational workshop environments. She was selected as the Design Fellow for L’Ecole De Design, India studio in Pune where she assisted in facilitating classes, projects, design juries. As an illustrator and graphic designer, she has worked in It’s ok to talk, New Delhi, where she created informative illustrations on mental health-care for social media outlets. At KTK-BELT, she has been developing beautiful and thoughtful modules for outdoor education to enable rural young children to become stewards of their own landscapes and biodiversity habitats.