Alumni Events

Don’t miss the fun of our alumni events!

Watch your e-mail for information about upcoming events, and check our website often.

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2018 National AIA Conference Alumni Reception

Our alumni reception at the AIA National Conference was held on June 21, 2018. The event was held at Gensler in New York City and hosted by Robin Klehr Avia, Gensler’s regional managing principal.

During the event, Dean Scott Poole highlighted many exciting recent successes of the college and our alumni. Here are a few:

Alumni

Congratulations to five alumni who were elevated to AIA Fellows this year.  The 2018 class includes

• Josh Flowers, 2001, HBG Design, Memphis, TN;
• Bill Gallagher, 1976, KGP Design Studio, Washington D.C.;
• J. Todd Robinson, 1981, ESa, Nashville, TN;
• John Sanders, 1997, Sanders Pace Architecture, Knoxville, TN;
• Ed Tucker, 1982, Edward Tucker Architects, Huntington, WV.

Students

We are preparing to welcome one of the college’s largest undergraduate classes in our history with 122 freshmen who have an average GPA of close to 4.0.  (The largest class was last year and was 123 students.)

Our students have become frequent winners in national and international competitions:

• For the fourth year in a row a student in the School of Interior Architecture was the winner or runner up of the national Gensler Brinkmann Scholarship. In January, Niklos Toldi, a third-year student, earned first place in the competition receiving a $10,000 scholarship and an internship at Gensler’s San Francisco location this summer.
• Two student teams were named winners of Architecture at Zero, an international design competition that challenged designers to create a zero-net energy bayside community education and visitor’s center near San Francisco. This is the first time two teams from the same university have won top awards in the same year in the competition’s seven-year history.
• At this year’s Chancellor’s Honors Banquet, fifth-year Architecture student Dillon Dunnwas named the 2018 Undergraduate Researcher of the Year for UT Knoxville. He also was named a Fulbright Scholar…the college’s first. Savannah Dixon, a 2017 Architecture graduate, also received a Fulbright this year. To put this in perspective, just four years ago, the entire university had two student Fulbright Scholars.

Philanthropy

• In the first nine months of this fiscal year, we raised more than $1 million including very generous estate gifts from Daryl Johnson, Mark and Ruth Ann Rowland and Matthew and Stephanie Boomhower.
• Several donors funded new or increased student scholarship endowments including David Epstein, Gensler, NYC; David Bailey, Hastings Architecture; Stephanie and Matthew Boomhower, and Marc and Ruth Ann Rowland. Also, Hastings Architecture increased their commitment to their existing endowment.
• We also added two new industry partners: Johnson and Galyon Construction and Clayton Homes.  Contact Pamela Treacy to learn more about being an industry partner.