Brad Collett, assistant professor in the Department of Plant Sciences and core faculty in the School of Landscape Architecture, has been recognized as a Fulbright Scholar for the 2015-2016 academic year. Collett will be teaching at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia during the spring 2016 semester. The performative potential of the designed landscape to mediate the relationship between development patterns and water resources health is the focus of a seminar course he will teach as well as perspectives he will bring to the design studio.
His teaching highlights the emergence of landscape architecture as a discipline taking a leadership role in addressing contemporary challenges through ecological and environmental lenses.
“This emergence has yielded innovative planning frameworks, resilient, multifunctional infrastructure approaches and performance-driven urban design solutions in the United States and abroad, representing a shift from traditional, aesthetically-driven paradigms of landscape architectural practice. Embracing such a shift as part of landscape architecture education in Slovenia will prepare students to play leading roles in the stewardship of the young democracy’s valued water resources, productive agricultural land, and scenic landscapes from prevailing free-market development trends and perfunctory stormwater infrastructures,” Collett noted.
His coursework in Slovenia is an extension of his teaching, design research and outreach initiatives in the School of Landscape Architecture. Since joining the faculty in 2011, Collett has focused on performative potentials of landscape, specifically watershed stewardship through low-impact development and sustainable planning and design practices. Collett was selected as a Faculty Research Fellow for the 2014 Case Study Investigation Program, a unique research collaboration sponsored by the Landscape Architecture Foundation that documents the benefits of exemplary high-performing landscape projects. In 2013 he co-authored “Low Impact Development: Opportunities for the PlanET Region.” Community-engaged service-learning opportunities are offered under his leadership through UT’s Smart Communities Initiative and the Environmental Design Lab.