Taubman College congratulates Tsz Yan Ng and Ana Paula Pimentel Walker on their promotions to associate professors. The University of Michigan Board of Regents approved the promotions at their May 19, 2022, meeting.
Tsz Yan Ng
Promotion to Associate Professor of Architecture, with Tenure
Ng is an architect, technologist, and theorist whose record of projects, prototypes, patents, peer-reviewed publications, awards, and funding have established her as a leading scholar and creative practitioner working at the intersection of digital design with robotic fabrication and material research. The primary domains of Ng’s research are robotic 3D printing of concrete, textile fabrication through robotic needle felting, and concrete casting with knitted textile formwork. Her work has manifested primarily through designs and prototype architectural assemblies that she has developed and fabricated. Ng has showcased her work in numerous exhibitions and university galleries.
One of Professor Ng’s strengths is her combined technical expertise in digital design and fabrication with artistic and creative ability as a designer fluent in architectural creativity with a secondary focus on textile and fashion design. She overlays this ability with a distinctive third area of focus: labor and the social dimensions of the processes through which we create our built environment.
Ng received her bachelor of science in 1996 and her master of architecture in 1998 from the University of Buffalo. She received her post-professional master of architecture from Cornell in 2001. She held teaching positions at McGill University and the State University of New York at Buffalo with an initial appointment as a Reyner Banham Fellow, before joining Taubman College in 2007 as the Sanders Fellow. While at Buffalo, she worked as an associate designer in the Studio for Architecture (Mehrdad Hadighi). Since 2004, Professor Ng has maintained an independent professional practice, Tsz Yan Ng Design, based in Ann Arbor.
Ana Paula Pimentel Walker
Promotion to Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, with Tenure
Pimentel Walker’s research centers on three interrelated themes: the potential of participation-based institutional reform (especially participatory budgeting) to improve people’s lives in informal settlements of the Global South, particularly Brazil; the interrelationship between law, institutions, and planning in slum-upgrading policy; and the role of community-based organizations in refugee resettlement in the United States. A common thread is Pimentel Walker’s attention to techniques through which traditionally marginalized individuals and groups can gain agency over the policies and practices shaping their neighborhoods and lives.
Pimentel Walker’s publication record stands out for its high quantity and quality. She has published more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers, some of them quite substantial, in a range of respected journals that reflect the breadth of her research. Within Taubman’s urban and regional planning faculty and the planning field at large, her contributions illuminate normative state planning processes from the perspective of the frequently disempowered people and communities and demonstrate the promise and challenges of participatory self-governance. Pimentel Walker’s ability to work across multiple disciplines, languages, and contexts makes her distinctively valuable at elevating research and teaching capacity.
Pimentel Walker earned a doctorate in sociocultural anthropology from the University of California, San Diego, in 2013. She received a master of urban and regional planning and a master of arts in Latin American studies from UCLA in 2005 and a juris doctorate in law from the University of Cruz Alta, Brazil, in 1998.
