Ulrike Passe, CBER Director


Passe is a Full Professor of Architecture and has been a faculty member in the Architecture Department at ISU since 2006, where she teaches architectural design and environmental technologies. She has been leading CBER since 2008.

Ulrike Passe received her Diplom - Ingenieur degree (equivalent to a Master of Architecture) in architecture from the Technical University in Berlin, Germany in 1990. She is a licensed architect in Germany, a member of the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA) and an International Associate of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Her work experience includes more than 15 years of professional practice in architecture specializing in energy efficient buildings and six years teaching and researching in architectural design and building technology at the Technical University in Berlin.

Passe was the Principal Investigator and Faculty Advisor to the ISU Solar Decathlon Team to build an entirely solar-powered house on the National Mall in Washington D.C in Fall 2009. The project involved interdisciplinary research into energy efficient building envelopes, passive and active solar technologies, passive cooling strategies and natural ventilation, green design and technologies, thermal comfort and bio-composite materials.

In 2015 she published “Designing Spaces for Natural Ventilation: an Architect’s Guide (Routledge) with Dr. Francine Battaglia; and transformed the Interlock Houes into an NSF funded community research lab as part of the Iowa EPSCOR project. She leads the interdisciplinary ISU Sustainable Cities team integrating human-building-microclimate interactions into urban energy models for resilience and is currently involved in multiple active NSF grants. Passe is a former president of the Society for Building Science Educators (SBSE) and current US representative on the Passive Low Energy Architecture (PLEA) Board and has lectured and published worldwide.

About Passe

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