Program Staff & Faculty

Faculty Committee

Eric Benson

Associate Professor, School of Art and Design

Eric Benson is an associate professor of the Graphic Design program in the School of Art and Design. He worked professionally as a UI/UX designer at Razorfish and Texas Instruments before he received his MFA in design from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. His MFA thesis became the internationally recognized and award-winning sustainable design website Re-nourish. He created the Fresh Press Agri-Fiber Paper Lab. Fresh Press explores the potential of papermaking to be zero waste, environmentally sustainable, and a catalyst for a thriving local economy. Benson has published and lectured internationally on the importance of sustainable design. His work has also garnered numerous design awards and has been seen in notable venues like the Walker Art Center, the Hammer Museum, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, RISD, and Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. He is also an active participant in the national design scene and local Champaign community serving on the American Institute of Graphic Arts Design Educators Community and on the board of directors at 40North and Common Ground Food Co-op. Eric recently helped launch a new project for climate designers.

Colleen Chiu-Shee

Assistant Professor in Urban and Regional Planning

Colleen Chiu-Shee brings a professional background in architecture and urban design as well as scholarly training in social sciences. She is broadly interested in pathways toward more sustainable urban futures. Her research explores innovative spatial, social, and policy interventions that seek to reform existing practices to foster environmental sustainability and socio-ecological equity. Dr. Chiu-Shee’s doctoral dissertation critically examined eco-cities in China and reflected on how developing countries forged adaptive capacity while grappling with the dual challenges of environmental degradation and rapid urbanization. Building on her dissertation, Dr. Chiu-Shee has employed a comparative and relational approach to explore green city practices in broader international contexts.

Dr. Chiu-Shee’s scholarship seeks to bridge theory and praxis related to city design and development and enable cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural dialogues. This commitment involves forging connections among diverse knowledge domains, experiences, and epistemological perspectives across global boundaries. She has developed collaborations between North America and Asia and examined a range of subjects, including housing policy and affordability, community development and collective governance, urban informality and land politics, climate resilience in vulnerable regions, land reclamation and coastal development, master-planned new cities and communities, and digital infrastructure for pandemic management.

Mary Pat McGuire

Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture

Mary Pat McGuire is an Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She serves as Dean’s Fellow for Research in the College of Fine & Applied Arts, stewarding the implementation of the Publicly Engaged Research Option (PERO). McGuire has additional faculty appointments in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, the Institute of Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. From 2021 to 2024, she was Chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program for which she led a curriculum review process and organized recruiting, admissions, and thesis. McGuire is a licensed landscape architect in Illinois and Virginia, with previous licensure in California (2006 – 2012). Prior to her academic career, McGuire practiced landscape architecture for a decade including for Peter Walker and Partners in the San Francisco Bay area and Conservation Design Forum in Chicago.

John Stallmeyer

Associate Professor, Illinois School of Architecture

Professor Stallmeyer’s research and teaching focus on contemporary urban and architectural production and consumption under the influence of information and communications technology (ICT). His graduate studios explore the intersection of ICT and the design process through the exploration and integration of digital sketching and modeling environments with analog methods in a hybrid process. He teaches the graduate survey of architectural theory, which contextualizes key theoretical writings on the built environment of the last century within their social, cultural, political, economic and technological contexts. He is the author of Building Bangalore: Architecture and Urban Transformation in India’s Silicon Valley and coauthor with Prof. Lynne Dearborn of Inconvenient Heritage: Erasure and Global Tourism in Luang Prabang, which recently won the Environmental Design Research Association’s 2013 Achievement Award. He is currently working on a book exploring the influence of our ubiquitous data culture on the conception and perception of the built environment.  He is a faculty affiliate of the Illinois Informatics Institute, The Centre for Global Studies, and the Collaborative for Cultural Heritage Management and Policy.

Daniel Schneider

Past Sustainable Design Faculty Program Administrator
Retired Professor, Department of Urban and Regional Planning

Daniel Schneider was a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and faculty program coordinator for the Bachelor of Science in Sustainable Design. He has been an ecologist and environmental historian whose research focused on the interrelations between natural and human systems in sustainable planning and management. He completed a book on the history of the biological sewage treatment plant that examined the interrelations between the “natural” and “artificial” in this critical infrastructure. He investigated the ecology and management of bed bugs in U.S. cities, examining bed bug infestations as an issue of environmental justice. His teaching covered ecological applications to planning, watershed planning, urban ecology, and environmental history. He is a furniture designer and maker, focusing on using locally and sustainably grown hardwoods.