Award-winning educator Elizabeth F. Pober is Director of the Interior Design Division at the University of Oklahoma Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture. Under Pober’s guidance, The University of Oklahoma Interior Design division has been ranked among the top schools in the nation by Design Intelligence for its students’ skills in computer applications. She has also partnered with the OU Libraries and OU’s Innovation Hub to introduce cutting-edge virtual reality technologies to her upper-level interior design students.
Pober has also established a mentoring program, connecting junior and senior interior design students with professionals around the country, which has led to students’ professional placement in top firms, such as Gensler, HKS, and Corgan. This program has been recognized by the Oklahoma Foundation for Excellence’s David and Molly Boren Mentoring Initiative.
She has authored and co-authored articles in peer-reviewed journals, including “Process and structure: performance impacts on collaborative interdisciplinary team experiences,” “Experiential Learning Modules for Interior Design Visualization Strategies,” and “Building Information Modeling (BIM) Strategies: Pedagogical Models for Interior Design.” She has been awarded over $215,000 of funding in support of her research, mentoring, and teaching activities.
Pober has served as director of the College of Architecture’s popular Summer Academy for the past eight years, which hosts 30 high school students from across the State of Oklahoma on the OU campus where they spend a week immersed in projects related to interior design, architecture, environmental design, and construction science.
Pober, whose professional background includes commercial, healthcare, retail and residential design projects, holds a Master of Science degree in Construction Science and a Bachelor of Interior Design degree from The University of Oklahoma. She is a National Council for Interior Design Qualification-certified interior designer and is a member of the Interior Design Educators Council, the International Interior Design Association, and The Hospitality Industry Network.
