About the Consortium

Michael Gibson is an Associate Professor of Architecture at K-State, where he teaches environmental systems and building science seminars and currently leads the Net Positive Studio (www.netpositivestudio.org), a service-learning course focused on researching, designing, and building affordable, net zero housing prototypes with non-profit partners across the region. Following its inception in 2018, the studio has designed, prefabricated, and built several prototype homes with its partners, who have raised millions in additional financing and grants to replicate high performance housing designed by K-State student teams.  

Michael’s research with students has covered a range of building science topics including ventilated facades, translucent insulation, and the implementation of hemp and hemp-based materials in residential construction.  

Earning his B.A. from Miami University and his M.Arch from Harvard University, Michael is a LEED-accredited, licensed architect in Kansas and Missouri. In 2022, Michael launched the integrated architectural practice and prefab consultancy Helia LLC whose fabrication shop is located in Topeka’s NOTO Arts District.  

Dr. Mariana Junqueira is trained in Interior Design, Architecture, and Urbanism (History, Planning, Policy, and Design), with a graduate emphasis in Visual Studies. As such, she has taken an interdisciplinary approach to Interior Architecture, specializing in the intersection of interiors and a range of topics that encourage meaningful transactions with the built environment at multiple scales. 

With 10+ years of professional practice, research, and design teaching, Dr. Junqueira has focused on design pedagogies & DEI and theories of place and placemaking to support populations disproportionally impacted by a rapidly changing world. In this way, Dr. Junqueira’s qualitative approach to creative processes challenges future designers to act responsibly, advancing the scholarship in a critical, social, and culturally conscious manner. 

More recently, in 2024, Dr. Junqueira was nominated by the College of Architecture, Planning, and Design for the prestigious Dumbarton Oaks DEII Fellowship and was awarded the inaugural Engagement Champions fellowship, along with two of her APDesign colleagues, to develop the Better Housing Consortium at K-State.  

Dr. Susmita Rishi is an engaged urban scholar, whose work challenges and reconceptualizes hegemonic epistemologies (theories of knowledge), and pedagogies (methods and practices of teaching) that undergird the overarching fields of urban and built environment studies. She received a doctoral degree in Interdisciplinary Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2019. She also holds a master’s in architecture with a focus on Urban and Community Design from Pennsylvania State University. Her research and scholarship lie at the intersection of housing, social production of home, informality, and southern theory.

As an engaged scholar, Dr. Rishi tries to understand space, particularly the space of the home from the perspective of marginalized urban residents. Extending this focus to the US context, the first phase of her project “Double-Wide Lives: realities of chasing the American dream in its mobile home parks [MHPs]” was awarded the KState University Small Research Grant (USRG) 2023. In recognition of her engaged work, Dr. Rishi was selected as a fellow under the 2023-25 Deans’ Equity and Inclusion Initiative (DEII) funded by the Mellon Foundation.