Seokyung Park, MS, LEED AP BD+C, has joined Zahra Ghazanfari, MLA, ASLA, as a 2025 Joseph G. Sprague New Investigator Award recipient. The annual awards are selected through a peer-review process conducted by a multi-disciplinary jury convened by The Center for Health Design. The awards recognize and financially support research by graduate students and recent research degree recipients whose work can fill critical gaps in the field of Evidence-Based Design.
Park is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University. Her research project, “Enhancing Resident Health in Long-term Care Communities: Bridging Indoor and Outdoor Spaces,” aims to investigate how the design of indoor-outdoor transition spaces affects assisted living residents’ use of outdoor spaces. The goal is to develop an Evidence-Based Design toolkit to encourage residents’ outdoor use.
She joins Ghazanfari, MLA, ASLA, a Ph.D. student at Clemson University recently selected for her study, “Exploring How the Outdoor Environments in Pediatric Behavioral and Mental Health Facilities Can Support Therapeutic and Trauma-Informed Care of Patients.”
Her research aims to establish scientifically rigorous methods to evaluate how the outdoor environments of pediatric behavioral and mental health facilities can support treatment efficacy and patient outcomes.
