Elizabeth C. English
Biography
Elizabeth C. English, PhD
Associate Professor of Architecture
University of Waterloo
Dr. Elizabeth English is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in Cambridge, Ontario. She was formerly Associate Professor – Research at the LSU Hurricane Center. Her experience in education, practice, teaching and research is in both Architecture and Civil Engineering. Dr. English is the founder and director of the Buoyant Foundation Project, a not-for-profit organization based in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, and Cambridge, Ontario, that works on the development of amphibious foundation systems as a low-cost, low-impact flood mitigation strategy that supports the preservation of traditional housing forms and respects local cultural practices. Current projects focus on the needs of vulnerable low-income communities in coastal Louisiana and Texas, northern Canada, Jamaica and Vietnam. She came to flood mitigation from a background of many years of wind engineering research in the area of wind loads on buildings. Dr. English is a member of the ASFPM Non-Structural Floodproofing Committee, the ASCE Multi-Hazard Mitigation Committee and, at the University of Waterloo, the Water Institute and the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture and Urban Planning from Princeton University, a Master of Science in Civil Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a PhD in Architectural Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. In August 2015 Dr. English served as co-chair of ICAADE 2015, the first International Conference on Amphibious Architecture, Design and Engineering held in Bangkok, Thailand. She hosted the second ICAADE and the first Global Amphibious Policy Symposium (GAPS) at the University of Waterloo in June 2017.