UB faculty and M.Arch student receive best paper award

Published August 6, 2024

The Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) hosted its 55th annual conference in Portland this past June. Shreya Jaiswal, 2023 alumna of UB’s Master of Architecture program, along with professors Martha Bohm, Korydon Smith, and Edward Steinfeld, received this year’s Best Paper Award. The paper, “Sensory Engagement and Spatial Harmony: Unveiling the Role of Fire in Multisensory Design,” was a culmination of Jaiswal’s thesis research with Bohm, Smith, and Steinfeld and selected out of 380 presenting authors.

EDRA is one of the most established international research organizations on the built environment, hosting researchers and professionals from a wide range of design fields and social sciences. This year’s conference focused on the theme of human-centric environments, a long-standing area of expertise at UB. This is the sixth time that current and former UB faculty and students have garnered international awards from EDRA, including two Career Award recipients and Smith’s receipt of the Best Book Award in 2019.

Prior to enrolling at UB, Jaiswal completed a bachelor’s degree at Visvesvaraya National Institute of Technology (NIT), one of India’s 31 NITs. At UB, she served as a graduate teaching assistant, worked as an architectural intern at Young + Wright (Buffalo, NY), and received a 2023 Metropolis Magazine Future 100 designation – awarded to the top 100 graduating architecture and interior design students in the United States and Canada. Stemming from her research and design interests, Jaiswal now works as a sustainable designer at D2D Green Design (Albany, NY).

More about this award-winning paper can be found here