Biography

After a career in practice of over 12 years and following the completion of a masters degree in ‘Computation in Design’ in 1996, Catherine has been working in academia as a senior lecturer in Architecture, firstly at the University of Greenwich teaching post grad level Architecture & as course leader for Masters in Urban Design.

Where she secured 249K funding from HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council of England) for a three year best practice learning and teaching project exploring the ‘Creative use of Computers in Design’ and established the first Electronic Design Studio (EDS) within a School of Architecture in the UK. The culmination of the project resulted in the first International Symposium on Digital Creativity in 2000.

Catherine has worked at UCLA and undertook a six-month sabbatical as a visiting professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA. Where she worked within the Computation Research Group and taught in the School of Architecture MIT. From 2003 she has been a Principal Lecturer and Course Director for masters in Architecture and undergraduate Interior Architecture & Design, at the Canterbury School of Architecture now the University of the Creative Arts.

Since joining Portsmouth as a senior lecturer in the MA Sustainable Architecture and Masters in Urban Design programmes as well as undergraduate programmes, she has established and chaired research under CURe (Creative Urban Regeneration) and has run Computation Theory in Design Workshops at undergraduate level and supervises PhD students.

In 2008 through CURe (Centre for Creative Urban Regeneration) which brings together the built environment and associated disciplines within the university as an interdisciplinary group working with practice and cities on regeneration projects, in addition CURe is associated with The Academy of Urbanism as part of the UniverCities programme. Through CURe she has completed a two year regeneration project ‘Places from Spaces’ with SCA+D (Solent Centre for Architecture + Design) involving Brighton, Portsmouth & Southampton City councils funded by SEEDA; ‘Shaping Southsea’ Portsmouth seafront regeneration project funded by HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Fund - 30K). In 2010/11 she coordinated two Interreg IVC funded research projects as lead partner working with several European partners; TraCit (Transport Carbon IntenCities - €322K) and SILCS (Strategies for Innovative Low Carbon Settlements - €302K) and icollaborated in a larger Interreg IVB project PURE Hubs (Pioneers in Urban Rural Entrepreneurs - €906K of 6 million Euros) exploring the relationship between Urban and Rural Food production and sustainable communities. She is currently working with the John Pounds Centre Trust on a HLF bid for the regeneration of an historic building in the City and the regeneration of the South Parade Pier, for which she recently ran a successful public engagement event with over 300 plus contributors. She is working with WIT (Wessex Institute of Technology) to establish a conference in Urban Agriculture in 2016 and is working with the Universidad de Sevilla, research group TEP30 investigation and evaluation of daylight and thermal properties of the urban realm as part of the regeneration process using simulation software.

Research interests

• Explorations and innovations involving theories of computation dealing with problem solving, computational theory and complexity theories, formal models of computation, issues involving the logical processes of design thinking, covering languages of architectural form, their description by means of formal grammars, their interpretation, and their role in structuring design thinking.
• In particular research work that re-examines central issues of design theory in the light of recent advances in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, algorithmic processes, and the theory of computation.
• International Symposium Digital Creativity September 2008.
• Pyciscality of Virtual Space - collaborative research project with the School of Creative Technologies, 2007/8.