The
Nuckolls Fund for Lighting Education announced its 2015 grant and scholarship recipients during its annual
luncheon held during Lightfair, which this year took place on May 5 in New York
City. Six awards were presented; two $20,000 Nuckolls Fund grants and four
$5000 student awards.
C&C Lighting in Pittsburgh, led by Cindy Limauro, professor of lighting design at the School of Architecture and the School of Drama at Carnegie Mellon University, and her husband, lighting designer Christopher Popowich, received a $20,000 grant as an extension to Limauro’s 2013 and 2014 Nuckolls Fund grants. Limauro and Popowich will continue the architectural lighting design workshops at schools of architecture across the U.S. to promote the development of new lighting courses or expansion of existing lighting curricula. To date, eight universities have participated in the workshop series. A teaching video will be available fall 2015.
The second $20,000 grant was awarded to Mississippi State University to develop and present a new lighting class titled, “Integrated Lighting Solutions.” Associate Professor William Reihm and Instructor Robin Carroll, faculty members in the Interior Design program, are designing the course as an interdisciplinary endeavor involving four academic departments: interior design, architecture, building construction science and industrial and system engineering. The grant will aid Mississippi State University in building a sufficient lighting curriculum in order to establish a lighting certificate program at the school.
At the student level, the Jonas Bellovin Scholar Achievement Award, which carries with it a $5,000 purse, was awarded to Stephen Finney, who is enrolled in the Master of Fine Arts in Lighting program at the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City and will be graduating with a double major in lighting design and interior design.
Another of the student prizes, the Jules Horton International Student Achievement Award, which also carries with it a $5,000 stipend, was presented to Arpan Guha, a first-year graduate student enrolled in the architectural engineering Ph.D. program at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln where he is concentrating on lighting. Guha received his Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and a Master of Science degree in lighting in his native India.
Two more student awards were also presented for the first time; the Designers Lighting Forum of New York Student Achievement Awards. The first recipient was Charles Jarboe who is studying at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center in the Master of Science lighting program. Jarboe will put some of his award purse toward developing a lighting design for a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Sri Lanka.
The second recipient of the Designers Lighting Forum of New York Student Achievement Award was Craig Casey, a Ph.D. student in the architectural engineering program at Pennsylvania State University. Casey has been named chair of the 2015 IES Conference Steering Committee where he will lead conference planning efforts. His long-term goal is to teach lighting at the university level.
Jeff Milham, Nuckolls Fund president ended the luncheon ceremony with the announcement that the electronic database of lighting educators has been completed. “This is our outreach to all those who are eager for lighting design education, whether they are lighting students, lighting teachers, or lighting design practitioners,” Milham said. “We have openly shared our database with the IALD Education Trust, the IES Education Committee and the IES Teachers of Lighting Workshop coordinators. It benefits all of those organizations.”
The deadline for 2016 Nuckolls Fund grant proposals is Feb. 6, 2015. For more information and to download the current grant RFPs forms go to the Nuckolls Fund website.
