Erin Horn

Erin Horn is a PhD student in the UW Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering and a Pre-Doctoral Research Associate in the Circular City + Living Systems Lab (CCLS) in the College of Built Environments. Her work focuses on researching aquaponic systems optimization and integration with the built environment across scales including microbial processes, building systems, and regional sustainable & economic impacts through the lenses of circular economy and the Food-Water-Energy nexus. She specializes in pursuing environmentally sustainable, efficient, and healthy buildings & production systems by investigating the potential of building-integrated aquaponics BI(Aq), drawing on an interdisciplinary education and advising to bring together transdisciplinary methods, communication, and collaboration between engineering and built-environments fields.

Erin is co-advised in her PhD program of study by Professors Gundula Proksch (College of Built Environments) and Amy Kim (College of Engineering) and is accordingly co-affiliated in her graduate work with the Amy Kim- Healthy Buildings Research Lab in the UW CEE Construction, Energy, & Sustainable Infrastructure (CESI) group.

She holds a Bachelor’s of Science with Honors in Microbiology and a minor in Architecture from the University of Washington, and her master’s-level work within the Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering is in Environmental Engineering for Water Quality & Treatment. Her previous graduate research experience includes investigating the imperatives of balancing water safety and efficiency in sustainable buildings, and she has undergraduate research experience in Environmental Engineering & Microbiology, Oceanography, and Plant Biology. From a young age, she has been excited about the concept of designing with living systems to create more balanced, sustainable, and ecologically-functional built environments, and is thrilled to be pursuing this mission with CCLS.