University Park, Pa. -- Peter Aeschbacher, assistant professor of landscape architecture and architecture at Penn State, has been named the University's inaugural Scholar in Residence for Public Scholarship in Penn State Learning, a unit of the Office of Undergraduate Education. He was recognized for his ongoing efforts to promote democratic practices in academia.
Aeschbacher, who also works with Penn State's Hamer Center for Community Design, was a Penn State Public Scholarship Fellow in 2007-08 and has been involved in the University's Constitution Day activities since that time. His nationally recognized Constitution Day installations have involved hundreds of Penn State students in the integration of space, design and community as vital elements within the complexities of democratic practice.
According to Jeremy Cohen, associate vice president and senior associate dean of undergraduate education, Aeschbacher is "helping to lead a significant change in the University's approach to student learning success through Penn State Learning."
In October, Aeschbacher was the invited speaker at Penn State Learning's annual seminar, where he discussed the book "Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet," and addressed how students' extracurricular activities could be an opportunity to engage them with the ethics of their chosen fields.
"If education is preparing students to be successful in their lives, then engaging their energies and enabling their efforts through public scholarship now may have a positive result," he said.
Trained as an architect, urban planner and graphic designer, Aeschbacher has extensive national and international experience in design and community development. He has worked with arts-based non-profit organizations, undertaken numerous community revitalization and affordable housing projects and been an activist and advocate for social and environmental justice issues. He also has worked closely in and with underserved communities and marginal populations, including community-based projects involving at-risk youth in Los Angeles, Calif.
A Penn State faculty member since 2004, Aeschbacher is a former Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellow (2000-2003) with the Los Angeles Community Design Center. His research addresses post-modern urbanism and the conflicts that develop between modernist "top-down" planning and design systems and the needs and rights asserted by self-organizing communities. He is a founding member of CityWorksLA and is a board member of the Association for Community Design. Aeschbacher has lived and traveled widely, including working as a graphic designer in Switzerland. He worked in South Africa on community development projects during the transition from apartheid.