Nicholas de Monchaux Named Bakar Faculty Fellow & Recipient of Spark Fund Award
Congratulations to Nicholas de Monchaux on being named a Bakar Faculty Fellow and recipient of the Spark Fund Award for 2017-2018!
The Bakar Fellows Program at UC Berkeley fosters faculty entrepreneurship in the STEM+ fields including Engineering, Computer Science, Chemistry, Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Architecture. On a competitive basis, Bakar Fellows are awarded discretionary research support to mature & translate their ground-breaking discoveries and innovations into commercial solutions. The one-time, up to $300K prize is designed to be a discretionary fund to assist the Fellow with ‘pivoting’ to new research directions upon commercialization of previous research results. Started in 2012, the Bakar Fellows Program enriches Berkeley by supporting entrepreneurial faculty & their research groups. To date, the Bakar Fellows have formed these startup companies, with more underway.
Below is Nicholas’ description of his project:
Local Code: Connecting CAD & GIS for Networked and Sustainable Urban Design
Our work connects two previously separate worlds of information and design in the built environment; Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Computer-Aided Design (CAD). Over the last five years, we have shown how a robust integration between CAD and GIS can produce unprecedented and essential design work, such as our 3,659 individual proposals for distributed ecological infrastructure in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Such proposals accomplish much of what large, single infrastructure proposals would accomplish for the city, but at a reduced cost, and with far greater resilience and investment in at-risk communities. As well as a way to make better cities and landscapes, however, the methods we have prototyped are potentially instrumental for a range of design markets. From locally optimizing solar energy installations to effectively configuring ecological prefabricated housing on many sites, we believe our work can play a key role in a wide range of new, digital connections between how we map the world and how we make it.