Kristen Ambrose
Assistant Professor of Practice
Kristen Ambrose, AIA, EDAC, LEED AP BD+C is a Vice President and Studio Practice Leader at HKS, Inc. Kristen is a registered architect in North Carolina, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Texas with nearly 20 years of experience designing environments for learning, science, technology, and healthcare. Her experience in design, practice technologies, and design research originated within interdisciplinary architecture firms focused on designing environments that create immersive learning experiences.
Kristen specializes in planning and programming to guide design decisions that support curricular objectives, operational efficiencies, as well as sustainable and resilient design principles. Kristen focuses on excellence in design and analytics utilizing digital media and data visualization. She has examined how architecture and the design process integrate benchmarks to support innovative environments through the implementation of evidence-based research to study design outcomes. A critical aspect of Kristen’s human-centered design research focuses on pre- and post-occupancy evaluations of environments that reveal opportunities to optimize design across the life-cycle for occupant health and building energy use.
She has lectured on the integration of practice-based representation and documentation methods in academia as well as the utilization of BIM across the life cycle of the project from design and construction to facilities management, including environmental evaluations.
As an educator with over ten years of teaching experience in design disciplines, Kristen teaches design to improve the performance of the built environment. She has taught Foundations of Design and Digital Design courses, including Integrated Practice at the University of Maryland.
