The Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education announced its 2014 grant and scholarship recipients during its annual luncheon held during Lightfair, which this year took place on June 3 in Las Vegas. Three awards were presented; one $20,000 Nuckolls Fund grant and two $5000 student awards.
Carnegie Melon University was the recipient of the $20,000 Nuckolls Fund grant for its architectural lighting design workshop series. The program, which also received a $20,000 Nuckolls Fund grant in 2013, is overseen by professor of lighting Cindy Limauro, who teaches in the School of Architecture and the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University. The workshops assist schools of architecture in either developing new courses in lighting design or for expanding already established in-house lighting programs. They are open to students and faculty. The 2013-2014 workshops were held at Northeastern University in Boston, California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo, Calif., the University of Texas, Austin, and the University of California, Berkeley. The 2014-2015 workshop sites have yet to be determined by Professor Limauro.
At the student level, the Jonas Bellovin Scholar Achievement Award, which carries with it a $5,000 purse, was awarded to Yulia Tyukhova a second year Ph.D candidate at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. A Fulbright Scholar, Tyukhova’s field of research is high dynamic range imaging for luminance measurements. She presented a paper on this topic at the 2012 Illuminating Engineering Society annual conference, which has also been published in Leukos, the Journal of the Illuminating Engineering Society of North America.
Another of the student prizes, the Jules Horton International Student Achievement Award, which also carries with it a $5,000 stipend, was presented to Ukwatte L. Indika U. Perera, a graduate student from Sri Lanka who is studying at the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, N.Y. Perera received his master’s degree in lighting from RPI, and is now a doctoral candidate in architectural sciences with a concentration in lighting. His area of research is improving the performance of white LED systems for illumination applications.
In addition to the award presentations and an update of the fund’s activities, the luncheon’s guest speaker was Professor Cindy Limauro of Carnegie Mellon University. In her talk, she relayed the findings of her 2013 Nuckolls Fund Grant activities and her forthcoming plans for the 2014 award.
The fund has also recently redesigned its website and now includes easy access to educational resources. For the first time seven independent teaching modules from the “Lighting Across the Design Curriculum” are accessible via the site’s educational resources section. This project was supported by a $50,000 Nuckolls Fund Twentieth Anniversary Grant awarded in 2010. The principal investigator was Professor Katherine S. Ankerson of Kansas State University. A second teaching module, “Lighting Controls—Tools for Teaching,” is also posted on the Fund’s website. It was developed by Erin Speck at George Washington University who received a 2012 Nuckolls Fund Edison Price Fellowship.
