SFI External Professor Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new dean of UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design (CED), with a term commencing July 1, 2027. De Monchaux, an acclaimed architect, urbanist, and scholar, has led MIT’s Department of Architecture since 2020 and is returning to UC Berkeley, where he was a professor from 2006 to 2019.
“As an academic leader at Berkeley and MIT, he helped build new relationships and programs in design (including Berkeley’s Master of Design program and MIT’s new Morningside Academy for Design), created impactful new models connecting design and research in the built environment, and helped support groundbreaking research on climate, resilience, and cities,” writes UC Berkeley in an announcement.
“CED powerfully shaped every way in which I think about design and its responsibility in the world,” de Monchaux said in the UC Berkeley announcement. “From the role of building in driving our climate crisis, through the role of construction, policy and planning in stewarding resilient landscapes and institutions, to the urgent task of ensuring access to cities, housing, and education across the world, CED addresses the great challenges of our time. I can’t wait to support the college as it reinvents and strengthens its impact.”
De Monchaux has been a frequent visitor to SFI since 2001 and has participated in multiple research collaborations with SFI faculty. In 2019, de Monchaux joined an InterPlanetary Festival panel discussion on “Extremophile Cities” and presented from his book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, a project that was first presented publicly as part of SFI’s public lecture series in 2003. He joined SFI’s external faculty in 2025.