Lecture: Teaching Fellows Research Dialogues
Monday, November 10, 2025
5:15pm - 7pm
Richardson Memorial Hall, Room 202 - Thomson Hall
Tulane's Uptown Campus
This lecture is open to the public.
Join us for the twice-a-year Teaching Fellows Research Dialogues, led by Lumina Baptista and Nhung Pham, KU Leuven Teaching Fellows at Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment.
About the speakers:
Lumina Baptista is an architect and urbanist whose work bridges architectural design, landscape urbanism and social ecologies.
She earned her Master of Human Settlements from KU Leuven, Belgium, where her work focused on the study of urban fabrics in transcultural contexts and metropolitan park systems in contested territories. Building on a background in architecture and urban design, her work addresses the relationship between spatial design, ecological systems and human agency. In her practice she has collaborated with international organizations for the development of underserved urban communities in her home city, Maputo, Mozambique. Her contributions include the design of sanitation infrastructure toolkits, a model for housing cooperatives in informal settlements and neighbourhood heritage conservation, addressing social, infrastructural and ecological challenges in rapidly urbanizing contexts, further supported by her Post-Master in Architecture for Crisis, Infrastructure, and Incremental Housing from Universidade da Beira Interior in Portugal. During her architectural licentiate degree at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, she secured second place in the “Imagining the Future of Informal Housing in Maputo”, an academic competition promoted by the School of Architecture and Planning of the University of the Witwatersrand. She later on served as a mentor in digital illustration at her alma mater, guiding students in the international illustration competition “Reimagining Architecture and Urbanism in the Post-Pandemic World” organized by the University of Alberta, Canada, overseeing both the visual and descriptive components of their submissions. Drawing from her multidisciplinary lens, Lumina’s practice and research focuses on the intersection of adaptive design and social ecosystems.
Nhung Pham is a practicing architect/ designer originally from Vietnam.
She earned her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City (UAH) in 2015 and later served as architectural design team leader at MIA Design Studio, Vietnam. She completed an Advanced Master’s in Human Settlements at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2022 as a VLIR-OUS Scholarship recipient, followed by a Master of Architecture at Aalto University, Finland, in 2024, with a minor in Wood Studies and graduating with Honors. In 2025, she received the Wuorio Prize from the Finnish Association of Architects (SAFA) for the best diploma thesis in architecture, which examined users’ preferences and modification patterns in different life situations, using “play” as a research method. Alongside her academic work, Nhung is a research assistant with RUA (Research Urbanism & Architecture), focusing on landscape urbanism in the Mekong Delta.
Drawing on over a decade of professional and academic experience, she investigates how people shape the natural environment and how flexible housing can address the challenges of climate change, shifting needs, and cultural diversity.
Alongside her academic work, Nhung is a research assistant with RUA (Research Urbanism & Architecture), focusing on landscape urbanism in the Mekong Delta. Drawing on over a decade of professional and academic experience, she investigates how people shape the natural environment and how flexible housing can address the challenges of climate change, shifting needs, and cultural diversity. She is currently pursuing her PhD at KU Leuven and Aalto University, exploring how “play” can be used as a qualitative preference study method to inform user-centered flexible housing design.
Questions? Please reach out to Ben Neal, Executive Administrative Assistant, at bneal1@tulane.edu.
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