CEE’s Kara Peterman Obtains ISI Fellowship to Develop Coursework on Cities

Content

Associate Professor Kara Peterman, the Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Affairs in the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department, has been selected by the UMass Amherst Interdisciplinary Studies Institute (ISI) as a Faculty Fellow to participate in its pioneering initiative on "Indeterminacy: A Study of the City and Its Environs." Peterman will use the resources provided by her ISI fellowship for modifying an existing course in the CEE department – CEE 444 Unified Structural Design – to study and help resolve the tension between “buildings for the masses” and “buildings for the few” in our cities. 

As part of her fellowship, Peterman will receive research funds of $2,000 and will participate in a series of structured seminars, workshops, lectures, presentations, and discussions coordinated by the ISI.

Peterman’s ISI proposal is titled “Pencil Towers and Public Housing: How Cities Weave a Tangled Web.” 

As Peterman explains, “Cities face a tension between the need to house people affordably and the costs of doing so at a mass scale. Land is expensive, and developers are not keen to back low-cost/low-income projects. While the global elite demand luxury housing [that] they may only live in for weeks in a year, housing instability abounds, workers commute hours a day, and families live in unsafe conditions.” 

Peterman’s proposal addresses these critical issues and more. “This project explores this tension and the history of both public housing and pencil towers from a social and structural perspective,” she says. “Here, we use ‘pencil towers’ to refer not only to structures like [New York’s] 432 Park Avenue (the first pencil tower – a structurally innovative system which achieves high slenderness, enabling large square footage over a small footprint) but all tall buildings built for an elite clientele.”

As Peterman says about the CEE 444 course that she will be remodeling, “We seek to compare structural systems and how they respond to societal needs and ask the questions: ‘How do these structures provide shelter?’ ‘What is required to house someone in 2025?’ ‘How has this changed over time?’ ‘How do we raise the profile of ordinary buildings and excite engineers to work on them and innovate within them?’” 

As the ISI describes its cities initiative, “The shifting landscape of environmental, social, and political emergencies and complex geo-political formations and disintegrations [has] made indeterminacy a constant feature of urban environments. While indeterminacy connotes uncertainty, it can also foster new forms of thinking and making by letting in interpretation, improvision, and ambiguity. With an interest in establishing new modes of co-thinking and co-working, indeterminacy is both understood as a condition that is forced upon us and one that can be embraced.”

As head of the Basic Infrastructure Research Group (Home - Dr. Kara Peterman), Peterman investigates the behavior of steel structures, the sustainability of basic infrastructure and infrastructure materials, and the stability of thin-walled steel members. Her experimental work has investigated subjects ranging from material-scale to connections to subsystems to full-scale buildings while examining our most fundamental civil infrastructures to our most specialized. 

Peterman is also the director of the Boyle and Brack Structural Testing Laboratories at UMass Amherst.

Among other honors, Peterman has received: the 2022 Milek Fellowship and the 2021 Terry Peshia Early Career Faculty Award from the American Institute of Steel Construction; the 2021 McGuire Award for Junior Researchers from the Social Science Research Council; and the 2018 Norman Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), its highest honor for a technical paper. 

In recognition of her accomplishments as an educator, Peterman was also awarded the 2021 Riccio College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award, the 2025 James L. Tighe CEE Outstanding Teaching Award, and was twice the recipient of the ASCE Student Chapter Outstanding Faculty Award.