Jana VanderGoot has been promoted with tenure to associate professor of architecture by the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Jana’s teaching, research and practice center at the intersection of design and environment. She draws on her experience as an architect and landscape designer to explore how urban design can respond and coexist with the natural world in resilient, regenerative ways. Her work and expertise touch on urban planning, landscape urbanism, innovative building processes and materials, climate adaptation and building lifecycles.
VanderGoot has led a number of collaborative community-based design studios that address these topics, most notably strategies for flooding and sea water rise in Salisbury, Md., later adopted as part of the city’s master plan. She is the founder of the Low Heat Research Collaborative, a partnership with BeckerLinn Design and UMD’s National Center for Smart Growth. Her 2018 book, Architecture and the Forest Aesthetic: A New Look at Design and Resilient Urbanism, examines and imagines the forest/urban connection and how the constructs of the natural world inspire and test how we design our urban environments. She is currently a research contractor with Yale University's Carbon Containment Lab, where she and her colleagues are experimenting with landscape and architectural design strategies for extracting carbon out of the atmosphere and containing it on land and in water.
VanderGoot holds a Master of Landscape Architecture degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia and a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame. She is an award-winning architect and founding partner at VanderGoot Ezban Studio.
Read more in her biography.