UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Stuckeman School faculty within the Department of Architecture are hosting Dana Cupkova, assistant professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and co-founder and design principal of EPIPHYTE Lab, as a keynote speaker on April 18 in the South Forum (third floor) of the Stuckeman Family Building on Penn State's University Park campus. The event is sponsored by the National Concrete Masonry Association as part of its annual Architecture Student Design Competition.

Cupkova’s research looks at the relationship between design space and ecology as it engages computational methods, thermodynamic processes, and experimentation with geometrically driven performance logic. Her design work has been published internationally in print and online publications such as Dwell, The Architectural Review, Green Building & Design, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Architect's Newspaper, and the International Journal of Architectural Computing.

Founded in 2009 by Cupkova and the late Kevin Pratt, EPIPHYTE Lab is an architectural design and research collaborative based in Pittsburgh. According to the EPIPHYTE website, Cupkova and Pratt founded the studio “on the premise that innovative architecture occurs at disciplinary boundaries, where design, insight, research and the built environment bleed across traditional didactic precincts.”

In May 2018, Epiphyte Lab was recognized as the “Next Progressives” design practice by ARCHITECT magazine, the journal of the American Institute of Architects.