Carnegie Mellon University

Erica Cochran Hameen

July 19, 2022

Faculty Feature: Erica Cochran Hameen

By Prathit Dave

Kristen Whitliner

Scott Institute Faculty Affiliate Erica Cochran Hameen, Ph.D., NOMA, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP is an architectural designer and Assistant Professor at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture. In 2021, she was named the school’s first Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). She also serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Building Performance & Diagnostics (CBPD) and as Track Chair of the Doctor of Design (DDes) program. She teaches multiple undergraduate and graduate courses, serving as an instructor at Carnegie Mellon. There, she has developed a new course focused on energy efficient and healthy retrofits and has led several national research projects focused on energy efficiency, energy policy and environmental quality.

From 2009 to 2016, Cochran Hameen served as the program director for UDream at CMU, an academic and job placement program in the School of Architecture (SOA) that aims to increase diversity in the urban design profession nationally, and in the Pittsburgh region specifically, by offering opportunities for permanent employment to recent college graduates.

Dr. Cochran Hameen has architectural experience in over 50 educational, media and broadcast, residential, community, and transportation facilities. With her vast experience, she has served as a studio critic in many universities and has earned many honors and awards for her research and architectural design project participation. Some of those include awards from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), NY Landmarks Conservancy, Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Faculty and Graduate Student Awards, and most recently Best Proposal in a Department of Energy (DOE) Competition presented at the White House Conference Room.

Equitable sustainability is at the center of her work. For energy efficiency, she believes that it is very important to ask how to achieve energy efficiency with holistic collaboration across all demographics and all sectors. One of the categories in that, where she works on is Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ). The IEQ further classifies into five metrics: acoustic quality, air quality, lighting quality, spatial quality and thermal quality. Her work on IEQ is focused on the vulnerable populations in the US, where people from lower income families and ethnical minorities are facing energy efficiency issues.screen-shot-2022-07-22-at-11.38.38-am.png

As part of the Center of Building Performance and Diagnostics at CMU project, Cochran Hameen has worked a National Environmental Assessment Toolkit (NEAT) cart to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings. The cart was developed at Carnegie Mellon by researchers Vivian Loftness and Azizan Aziz. Using this device, Dr. Cochran Hameen is researching the linkage of the IEQ metrics on the academic performances, absenteeism and health of students in school classrooms. The research is focused on public schools in vulnerable communities.

After learning the usefulness of the NEAT cart, her team is currently working on developing an IEQ robot. This robot is more sophisticated version of the cart which quantifies the data of such metrics in the schools of Pittsburgh. This research project, driven by CMU students and Cochran Hameen, let students and schools do the experiment free of charge to run and analyze the IEQ robot. Broadly, the research is divided into two parts: the statistical analysis to link these environmental and engineering features of buildings with school performance metrics such as low-test scores and teacher turnover rates; and quantify those metrics by operating the IEQ robot in the school classrooms. 

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Subsequently, the plan is to increase the reach for this robot in Pittsburgh in different ways. The analytics from the robot measurements gives building specific data as on what features of the building, if retrofitted, would reduce the energy consumption and improves energy efficiency the most. Those recommendations then would be presented to the utilities to frame rebate programs on such features.

Recently, Cochran Hameen presented to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), on the long-standing problem of ‘legalized racism’ in government spending on public amenities. She is working on a statistical analysis which shows the repercussions on targeted ethnical minorities that still affects the communities adversely. The findings from the study will help the stakeholders in formulating new improved policies in the future.  

In addition to all her research work, Cochran Hameen is also a contributing researcher for a Sustainable Engineering textbook and served as one of the Principal Investigators for the Consortium for Building Energy Innovation (CBEI), formally the EEB Hub, established by the DOE as an Energy-Regional Innovation Cluster. In 2021, she was also recognized with the Impact Designer Award by AIA Pennsylvania for making a positive impact on social, environmental and economic change through innovative solutions.

Erica Cochran Hameen holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, and a Master of Science in Sustainable Design and a Ph.D. in Building Performance & Diagnostics from CMU. Erica’s doctoral research investigated the impact of school building and neighborhood physical and environmental characteristics on student and teacher health and performance. She can be reached via email here.