Ana O
- Research Program Mentor
PhD candidate at University of Florida (UF)
Expertise
Architecture, Climate Resilience, Housing Affordability, Building Codes and Standards, Housing Policy, Urban Design, Housing Design, Disaster Planning
Bio
In 2020 I was working in a traditional practice in Louisiana. A pandemic started and three major storms made landfall across the state. The office promptly worked with our clients to rebuild. We were helping, technically, but writing “replace in kind” in a set of constructions drawings was not how I imagined I could contribute to lasting resilience. So I shifted. Toward participatory research. Toward creating strategies that build a practice of resilience. Today I dedicate both my research and practice to design, regulations, and the legacy building of frameworks that fit the actual complexity of people's lives. My research interests find good company in my personal interests and hobbies. I have 7 chickens, a sizeable vegetable and fruit garden, and more small home projects than I have time to complete. Travelling is my perspective shifting activity of choice. I have been to 12 countries in 4 continents, and 33 states in the US, with plans to visit all 50 (+ ideally every country).Project ideas
Meet Me at the Setback: A Comparative Analysis Between Lived Experience and Local Regulations
I work at the intersection of the built environment and the rules that shape it: building codes, zoning, and local regulations, and the question of how those rules meet, or miss, the way people actually live. I can help a student explore questions like how a neighborhood changes after a disaster, who a regulation is really written for, and where official rules and everyday experience pull apart. In this project, a student picks one place and one question, then gathers two kinds of public evidence. On one side, lived experience drawn from sources that are already public: local newspaper archives, letters to the editor, testimony at city or county meetings, and public social media posts about that place. On the other side, the regulations themselves, read closely for what they require and what they quietly assume. The student builds a small set of codes from the patterns that recur, analyzes where the two sides line up or diverge, and sets the findings against historical context and existing scholarship. Because every source is public, the project needs no interviews and no human-subjects approval. Along the way, a student learns to read regulatory language critically, work with archival and public-record sources, code qualitative material and analyze it thematically, triangulate different kinds of evidence, and write up a local case with academic rigor. The outcome is a research paper suited to a student research journal. This project could also be adapted into a poster or short talk for a student research symposium/conference.
Designing for People who Must Stay
As an architect, I keep returning to the same problem: how to design places that hold up and help people recover when the next storm hits. In this project, you will design a climate-resilient expansion for a community on the front line of that risk: oyster farmers working in waters exposed to hurricanes. Starting from the real conditions of a coastal site, you will research the hazards, define what the farmers need to keep working and stay safe, and develop your own design proposal in response. You will gain skills in site analysis, design-brief development, sketching and model-making, as well as presenting a design for a competition or showcase.