Winston Yuen CV + Cover Letter

Winston Yuen BHSc, MArch Candidate, EDAC, AAA Student Member

RESUME

winston.yuen@yale.edu 141 York St. Apt 16, New Haven, CT 06511 (475) 449-0082 winston-yuen.com

EDUCATION

AWARDS

Yale University

University of Calgary

-Emerging Young Architects and Planners—1st Place // 2016 -University of Calgary Student Activities Fund // 2014-2015 -Students’ Union Conference Funding // 2015 -O’Brien Centre Continuing Scholarship // 2014 -O’Brien Centre Summer Studentship // 2014 -Jason Lang Scholarship // 2012-2014 -CIHR Training Program Summer Studentship // 2013 -Markin USRP Fall/Winter Research Studentship // 2012-2013 -Student Peer Assistance Bursaries // 2011-2012 -PURE Summer Studentship // 2012 -Alexander Rutherford Scholarship // 2011 -University of Calgary Entrance Scholarship // 2011

ADDITIONAL EDUCATION/CERTIFICATION

COMPETITIONS/ BUILT WORKS

Harvard University Cambridge, MA // 2015 GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN Career Discovery Program (Architecture)

URB PRK Design-Build Competition - 1st Place Barn(E): The Electric Barn Edmonton, AB // 2016 Team of four students designed, managed, and constructed temporary parklet with locally sourced barn lumber. The sustainable design featured native flower species, and an electric bike generator, which powered LEDs at night. At the end of its lifecycle, the barn lumber was donated to the Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore.

Link: archisaurus.wordpress.com

New Haven, USA // 2016-Present Masters in Architecture (M.Arch)

Calgary, CANADA // 2011-2016 Bachelor of Health Science, Honours (Biomedical Science) Minor in Architectural Studies -Faculty of Medicine Dean’s List: 2011-2015 -Honours Thesis: Novel Cancer Therapeutics for Blood Cancer

TH CHAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH Engineering and Architectural Solutions to Airborne Infections Course The Center for Health Design Concord, CA // 2015 Evidence-Based Design Accreditation and Certification (EDAC)

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE Yale University, Woodshop Monitor New Haven, CT // Sept 2016 - Present (4 mo.)

Maintenaned fabrication shop machinery and tools; supervised students Tom Baker Cancer Centre, Student Researcher Calgary, AB // Sep 2014 - Apr 2015 (8 mo.)

Investigated novel medications with implications to treating multiple myeloma patients with less invasive and more effective therapy Snyder Institute For Chronic Disease, Student Researcher Calgary, AB // 2012 - 2014 (3 yrs) Identified and elucidated rare disease-causing genetic disorder.

Findings were presentated at multiple symposiums and to internal-medicine clinicians at the the Alberta Children’s Hospital.

Winston Yuen BHSc, MArch Candidate, EDAC, AAA Student Member

RESUME

winston.yuen@yale.edu 141 York St. Apt 16, New Haven, CT 06511 (475) 449-0082 winston-yuen.com

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT Observership, Michael Civitella, Executive Director Operations and Facility Development for New Cancer Centre, Alberta Health Services, Calgary // 2015 Job Shadow, Guy Pocock, Principal, Kasian Architecture Interior Design & Planning LTD., Calgary // 2015 Job Shadow, Bill Marshall, Principal, Marshall Tittemore Architects, Calgary // 2015 Job Shadow, Dr. Harold Lau, Senior Radiation Oncologist, Richmond Road Diagnostic Centre, Calgary // 2014 Job Shadow, Dr. Desiree Yow, Community Pediatrician, Foothills Medical Centre, Calgary // 2014 Interview, Rollin Stanley, City of Calgary General Manager of Planning, Development and Assessment, Calgary // 2013 Interview, Ronald McIntyre, Healthcare Principal Architect, Cannon Design, Vancouver // 2013 Job Shadow, Dr. Christopher Waterhouse, Pediatric Gastroenterologist, Alberta Children’s Hospital, Calgary // 2013 Job Shadow, Daniel Chan, Chief Executive Officer, Idisis – Integrated Workplace Management Systems, Calgary // 2013 Job Shadow, Dr. Gordon Douglas, Glaucoma Specialist, Canadian Glaucoma Society, Calgary // 2010, 2011 Job Shadow, Jeremy Sturgess, Principal Architect, Sturgess Architecture, Calgary // 2011 Job Shadow, Rick Balbi, Principal Architect, Rick Balbi Architects, Calgary // 2011

VOLUNTEER EXPERIENCE Performer, Alberta Children’s Hospital Ensemble // 2013-2016 Calgary, AB Performed in weekly piano solo, duet, and violin performances with ensemble. Coordinated with piano instructors to create performance program with students.

Senior Student Mentor, BHSc Buddy Program // 2013-2015 Calgary, AB Mentored and guided first-year Health Science students transitioning into University life.

Volunteer, Dulce Refugio Orphanage // 2013 Aguascalientes, Mexico Assisted in orphanage construction, exterior painting and cement pouring with church group. Helped to organized and fundraise $32500 for orphanage.

EXTRACURRICULAR COLLEGIATE ACTIVITIES Committee Member, Yale Architecture Curriculum Advisory Panel // 2016-Present New Haven, CT Surveyed students and proposed new curriculum changes to the Dean of Architecture and senior members Yale Retrospecta 40 // 2017 New Haven, CT Selected for school publication in Vizualization I, Vizualization II, and Studio I core classes.

Global Leadership in Namibia, Center for Community Engaged Learning, University of Calgary // 2013-14 Windhoek, Namibia Embarked on three week excursion to Bernard Norkamp Center to teach service-learning based program with workshops focusing on leadership, cultural competency, team building and identity.

Layout Editor, Editorial Team, Journal of Undergraduate Research in Alberta, University of Calgary // 2012-13 Calgary, AB Cooperated in organizing and coordinating workshops for undergraduate students. Assisted in editing manuscripts for publications.

Second Violinist, University Symphonic Orchestra, University of Calgary // 2011-13

The Rubik’s Cube // ESSAY for the Arts Graduate Scholarship

By mid-afternoon, Aguascalientes was already 40°C. My forehead dripped with sweat as I heaved more cement into the mixer. Although the construction site at the orphanage wouldn’t seem pleasant to most, to me it is filled with rich memories—and a critical piece to a 23-year old puzzle.

Dulce Refugio, Spanish for “sweet refuge,” could barely house the 50 orphans living there. That was where our group came in. Passionate about helping others, we raised $32,500 to fly down to Mexico and help. However, when I was assigned to mentor 10-year old Daniel during my “off-duty” time, my excitement turned into fear. How could I be a role model when I was also awkward, shy, and unsure of myself?

Like misaligned sequences in a Rubik’s cube, my disparate interests left me confused throughout my childhood.

I impressed my high school teacher with elaborate sketches of skyscrapers, so I sold my paintings to sponsor education for Mexican children. I loved hearing Beethoven’s symphonies and Mozart’s arias, so I spent my Saturdays at the Alberta Children’s Hospital performing piano and violin for hospitalized children and their families. My passion for helping others led me to study Pre-Med, where I earned an honours Health Science degree. When I received the prestigious O’Brien Scholarship for my work on Inflammatory Bowel Disease, my professors urged me to apply to medical school. Despite their encouragement, studying for medicine did not feel right. While my classmates immersed themselves in neuroscience or genetics, I was admiring how the hospital’s infrastructure functioned like the human body: air conditioning ducts were the respiratory system, while information technology was the neural network providing sensory data about the hospital’s internal environment. No matter how hard I tried, I did not find courses in biochemical pathways or pharmacological drugs mesmerizing.

When the summer arrived, with the release of medical school applications and my grandmother’s diagnosis of bowel cancer, I needed to get away. I loathed my daily trek from the University’s medical teaching campus through the labyrinthine and discordant tunnels to my grandmother’s patient room in the Tom Baker Cancer Centre. The convoluted hallways, the pale yellow walls, the distinct odor of cleaning agents, and the buzzing and beeping of IV machines were all a recurring nightmare. The opportunity to construct Dulce Refugio’s boy’s dormitory in Aguascalientes provided me the perfect outlet. But I never thought my time with Daniel at the orphanage would teach me my greatest lesson.

Daniel loved to follow me into the art room where I sketched pictures he used to decorate the orphanage’s plain walls. But after learning more about his unhappiness and loneliness, I was increasingly unsatisfied with merely constructing a building; the orphanage should be a place of healing and rejuvenation, not a concrete box where children are trapped.

With my team’s help, 10 days later, I designed and painted the new dormitory. Reds, greens, yellows, and others slowly weaved into the correct configuration of a Rubik’s cube across the walls. This represented the children of Dulce Refugio: misaligned initially, but supported and empowered by the orphanage to change their lives. I still laugh when I remember Daniel’s wild shriek of joy when he and his friends discovered their transformed home.

After leaving Mexico, I realized my future was also not an undecipherable puzzle, but rather, an intricate Rubik’s cube. Medicine is about helping others, and architecture can be its tool. I developed an immense interest in how the built environment can affect health, as well as how buildings to create more livable, and healthy spaces. I was fascinated by my classes such as Health and the Built Environment, excelled in my architecture minor courses, and won an architecture competition where my team was able to transform an Edmonton street parking stall into a vibrant public venue. When my grandmother passed away, I contacted the Dean of Medicine and the head architect of the new Foothills Cancer Centre to shadow its development from stakeholder engagement meetings, to construction and design meetings. I envisioned hospitals with bright patient rooms and access to gardens. I read clinical studies examining patient rooms that reduced stress, designs that reduced medical errors, improved healing, and cut hospital stays. Although it was too late to help my grandmother, I knew I could help future patients through design.

I sought out Harvard’s Career Discovery summer program in architecture, and fell in love with its challenging and stimulating studio experience. I learned quickly from my exposure to Harvard’s instructors, their cutting-edge designs,

winston.yuen@yale.edu

(475) 449-0082

and found myself unable to take my myself away from the work. Later, I also participated in the Airborne Infection Control course at Harvard’s School of Public Health. The complex interplay between multifactorial determinants of health taught me the importance of interdisciplinary teamwork in healthcare. I witnessed architects and doctors working together to redesign the hospitals that would fully utilize a combination of passive and mechanical ventilation in resource poor settings to decrease tuberculosis infection rates. By that summer’s end, I knew I had finally found my place. But there were still many facets of design, aspects of technology, and leading edge research left for me to explore.

With my acceptance into the Yale School of Architecture’s three-year Master of Architecture program, I have been able to further those goals in an environment that pushes for design and aesthetic excellence, while being sensitive to the economic and ecological factors that drive design. Yale has been consistently a top architecture school in North America. Its boasts a long pedagogical tradition of educators that teach a curriculum of history, design theory, building technology, sustainability, and graphic representation in hand drawing and digital media. Unique to the well-orchestrated core studio curriculum is the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project, where my class is currently working alongside faculty with a local non-profit homelessness organization to design and build permanent supportive housing for previously homeless individuals.

The Yale School of Architecture also offers me multiple opportunities to gain a global perspective in design. A drawing course in Rome is staple of the second year summer semester, multiple international symposiums and seminars are offered, and third year advanced studios study under and travel with internationally acclaimed architects, urban planners, and developers. These classes have gone to countries as diverse as Croatia, France, Greece, China, Japan and Iceland.

The technological and fabrication resources at the Yale School of Architecture are second-to-none and are able to help me explore, develop and test ideas about the physical environment. Yale has emerging technologies such as virtual and augmented reality devices create immersive environments from computer models, laser cutters and 3D-printers that are able to aid rapidly prototyping, exploring and visualizing physical environments, and finally, coding and parametric softwares that can create dynamic and adaptive environments that respond to internal and external factors. These technologies have the potential to break out from their confines have applications in developing healing environments.

In addition to learning from the architecture school, I will also have the opportunity engage in interdisciplinary learning. Classes taught by top academics and instructors of real estate law from the Yale Law School, entrepreneurship from the School of Management, epidemiology of infectious diseases at the School of Public Health, and sustainable development from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, will expand my picture on the complex relationship between health and design. With our newly installed dean expressing her aspirations of diversifying the Architecture School, and creating a more collaborative and interdisciplinary environment, my background in Health Science was welcomed into this program with the necessary space, resources, and freedom to explore my interests. Since then, I have joined the Curriculum Advisory Board where, along with a group of students, I will be working in conjunction with the dean of architecture and senior faculty to survey students, and to draft and review proposals to improve the systemic and elective curriculum structures. Engaging in the larger conversation of health and design, I am currently working to create a partnership between the School of Architecture and School of Medicine, the goal of which is to develop a committed group of students and faculty that will explore and facilitate tangible design solutions to improve health and well-being in the local hospitals and in the local community.

It has been a couple years since my visit to Mexico. But Daniel continues to write to me to this day. He told me again how much the home we built meant to him—it truly was a physical manifestation of love. Thanks to Daniel, I am convinced that architecture is a powerful tool that can help people during some of their most difficult times. With a diverse background of students, multiplicity of resources, excellence in pedagogy, and access to the intellectual and global hubs of New York and Boston, it is without a doubt in my mind that the Yale School of Architecture is the place that will best help me meet my goal of designing and building environments that meet the variegated needs of healthcare and architecture— solving the final sequences of my Rubik’s cube, at last.

winston.yuen@yale.edu

(475) 449-0082