Columbia GSAPP Assistant Professor Leah Meisterlin is honored with a 2019 Presidential Teaching Award by Columbia University

Prof. Meisterlin is one of five recipients who demonstrate commitment to excellent and innovative teaching as recognized by the entire Columbia University community.

The Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) is pleased to announce that its faculty member Leah Meisterlin is the recipient of a 2019 Presidential Teaching Award. This prestigious recognition is presented by President Lee Bollinger during the University Commencement, and accompanied by a $20,000 honorarium.

Leah Meisterlin (’06 M.S.UP, ’09 M.Arch), an Assistant Professor in Columbia GSAPP’s Urban Planning program since 2016, is only the second GSAPP faculty member to receive this high recognition after Professor Kenneth Frampton did so in 2011. “As a teacher, Professor Meisterlin connects deeply with students, guiding them in their education and in their professional lives, enabling them to consistently excel beyond their own expectations,” said Dean Amale Andraos. “Since joining Columbia GSAPP’s faculty in 2016, she has quickly established herself as a model professor able to share her deep knowledge and innovative research methods in a way that inspires students and encourages their success.”

Columbia University’s Presidential Teaching Award was established in 1996 as a way to honor the University’s best teachers. They are conferred to five faculty members each year. The selection process begins with an open call for nominations from the university community, which are reviewed by a selection committee comprised of 6 to 10 faculty members including prior winners of the award.

Professor Meisterlin is an urbanist and geographical information systems methodologist whose research engages concurrent issues of spatial justice, informational ethics, and the effects of infrastructural networks on the construction of social and political space. Before joining GSAPP, Professor Meisterlin taught at Barnard College and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She has been an Adjunct Research Scholar at Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and a Research Scientist at New York University’s Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health. She has edited the publication Comments on Foreclosed (2013) following the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (Museum of Modern Art, 2012), and co-authored The Buell Hypothesis: Rehousing the American Dream (2011). Her articles and essays have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Avery Review, ARPA Journal, and Drug and Alcohol Dependence, among others. Her work is also featured in Contemporary Digital Architecture: Design and Techniques (Ed. Dimitri Kottas, 2010) and The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (Ed. Kazys Varnelis, 2008).