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OU Construction Science Professor Bryan Bloom received the Provost’s Award for Outstanding Engaged Teaching. This award recognizes faculty that utilize innovative teaching techniques that promote community collaboration and high-quality, engaged learning. According to Ben Bigelow, “Professor Bloom’s passion is community engagement as a vehicle for giving students an unmatched learning experience. He has sustained his work for five years and, despite the additional time and pressure created by these projects, he persists.”
Since Professor Bloom joined as an OU faculty member, he has continued to develop Gibbs College’s “Design + Build” program. This program gives students hands-on experiences and real-world applications of their classroom knowledge. Over the past five years, his students have participated in a wide range of community projects, including an off-grid greenhouse for a school in Oklahoma City, and a mobile medical unit for the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes.
Dean Butzer praised Professor Bloom for his work: “[He] models transdisciplinary leadership and reciprocity, while also teaching construction best practices to our students. To accomplish this, he brings together key partners, including community members to inform project planning, architects or design faculty to conceptualize the designs, investors and philanthropists to fund the projects, and students to construct the projects.”
Congratulations to Professor Bloom for this well-deserved recognition!
Featured Image: Pictured from left to right, Jerry Puckett, Bryan Bloom and Ken Marold in front of a mobile medical unit, a previous Design+Build Project.
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
