Our Team

LEADERSHIP

Julie Kim, Director & Founder

Julie Ju-Youn Kim AIA is the Director and Founder of the Flourishing Communities Collaborative at Georgia Tech. Incorporating goals of equity and inclusion through her scholarship and design pedagogy, Julie strengthens the connections between the academy and practice. As both an educator and a practitioner, Julie’s work consistently includes structured collaborations between diverse stakeholders, seeking to define an alternative model that integrates education and practice, creating replicable models of engagement designed to expand equity through access. Flourishing Communities Collaborative builds relationships between students, faculty, practitioners, and the community in applied design thinking and problem solving for disadvantaged communities.

FACULTY COLLABORATORS

W. Ennis Parker

W. Ennis Parker, Jr., AIA, RIBA, is the Professor of Practice with a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the School of Building Construction. He directs the program management track in the Master of Science in Building Construction and Facility Management of the School of Building Construction.

His career includes leadership positions in a number of Atlanta architectural and program management practices, including serving as president of Heery International, Inc., Chief Executive Officer of the design/build firm Facility Group, Inc., and senior positions with Rosser International, KPS Group, and Robert & Company, and most recently, Vice Chairman of Brookwood Group, Developers and Program Managers. He currently consults as a client advisor on several projects including the $300 million City Springs (new city center) for the City of Sandy Springs, Georgia, and the new downtown revitalization of Fayetteville, Georgia. He has served as president of the Georgia Association of the American Institute of Architects, the Atlanta Chapter of AIA, and as national president of the Professional Services Management Association.

Tarek Rakha

Tarek Rakha joined Georgia Tech as Assistant Professor of Architecture in 2019 and was appointed Director of the High Performance Building Lab (HPBL) in 2021. His research and teaching aims to transform climate-responsive and sustainable architectural design decisions to advance racially and socially just solutions using…

robotics, sensing, modeling, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). He is an expert in building and urban performance simulation, vulnerability diagnostics using computer vision drones, and outdoor comfort for walkable and bikeable cities. He previously taught at Syracuse University (SU), RISD, and MIT.

Stuart Romm

Stuart Romm is a Professor of the Practice, having taught both graduate and undergraduate architectural design studios, plus a range of practice courses, in the College of Design for 25 years. Romm is a founding principal in the Atlanta architectural firms of Praxis3 and Romm + Pearsall, both multi-disciplinary practices…

focused on civic and educational buildings, advanced automotive facilities, and urban social housing. In these roles, he has developed special expertise in confronting the emerging intersections between media technologies and public space, as foregrounded in the current Georgia Tech Library Renewal Project (in collaboration with BNIM), and competition projects for the Center for Civil and Human Rights and CNN headquarters (in collaboration with Diller Scofidio + Renfro, NY). He has also held a special interest in the challenges of affordable housing, beginning with Romm + Pearsall’s award-winning entry to the Progressive Architecture ‘Affordable Housing Initiative’, and in Praxis3’s Renaissance Walk project on historic Auburn Avenue that won a South Atlantic Region AIA Honor Award in 2009.

Frank Wickstead

Frank Wickstead is a licensed general contractor, a LEED AP BD+C, a Building Performance Institute Building Analyst proctor/trainer, and an EPA/DOE Building Performance Subject Matter Expert. He received the Georgia Institute of Technology’s Environmental Leadership Award, was named one of the top 50…

in the country by Remodeler Magazine and was named the ‘EarthCraft Contractor of the Year.’ Frank is an Adjunct Professor at the School of Building Construction, College of Design, Partner at Anthem General Contracting Inc., and Partner at Jones Pierce Studios.

Danielle S. Willkens

Danielle S. Willkens, PhD, Assoc. AIA, FRSA, LEED AP BD+C is an architectural designer and architectural historian with expertise and publications in archival research, historic interpretation, and K-12 curriculum development and implementation centered on design-thinking. Her ongoing research, documentation, and visualization work has…

been supported by the National Center for Preservation Training and Technology, the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, an American Philosophical Society Franklin Research Grant, and the National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grant program. She is a FAA Certified Remote Pilot, a member of the Board of Trustees for the Atlanta Preservation Center, the Georgia representative for the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), and a member of the Digital Advisory Committee for the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH).