Popowsky Named Wilks Family Director at McHarg Center

Award-winning landscape architect, researcher, and educator Rebecca Popowsky has been named the Wilks Family Director of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at Weitzman.

Housed in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman, The McHarg Center was launched in 2019 as a transdisciplinary platform for collaborative research on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of McHarg’s groundbreaking book Design with Nature. The Center funds and broadcasts original scholarly research, convenes students, faculty, and practitioners, and awards the annual McHarg Fellowship.

“From developing next-generation coastal infrastructure to advancing protections for biodiversity in the face of rapid urbanization, The McHarg Center has become an indispensable bridge between academia and professional practice in landscape architecture,” said Catherine Seavitt, the Center’s faculty co-director, who is also the Meyerson Professor of Urbanism, and chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture. “Rebecca’s breadth of knowledge and collaborative affinities will serve the Center well as we advance ecological thinking and design to address current and future challenges to life on Earth at every scale.”

With Popowsky’s appointment, which began on January 1, 2025, the Wilks Family Directorship role has been expanded to a leadership position dedicated to building and cultivating relationships, supporting faculty research initiatives, serving as an active and visible advocate for the Center, and overseeing its financial wellbeing.

“Rebecca’s prodigious design and teaching abilities, her ability to forge meaningful and productive alliances, and her deep commitment to sustainability make her an ideal leader,” said Fritz Steiner, dean and Paley Professor at Weitzman and faculty co-director of The McHarg Center.

Popowsky most recently served as a research associate and the OLIN Labs coordinator at the internationally renowned landscape architecture firm OLIN, where she co-led its internal research practice since 2018. Developing innovations in waste-based material design and construction, soils engineering, and practice-based research models, she has established partnerships in the public, private, nonprofit, and academic sectors. Her work at OLIN has been funded by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the US Department of Agriculture, the Landscape Architecture Foundation, and the William Penn Foundation. She has collaborated with Penn’s Urban Health Lab, Temple University’s Department of Horticulture, the USDA Eastern Region Research Center, Philadelphia Parks and Recreation, the Philadelphia Water Department, the US Biochar Initiative (USBI), and the Pennsylvania Recycling Markets Center, among others. Her research has been recognized by the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. In her capacity as landscape designer at OLIN, Popowsky contributed to a wide range of design, planning, and construction projects, including Canal Park in Washington, DC; Dilworth Park in Philadelphia; the University of Washington North Campus in Seattle; and a collaboration with the US Army Corps of Engineers to restore the FEMA floodplain at the Potomac Park Levee on the National Mall.

Popowsky has a long history with Penn, having earned her MLA and MArch degrees from the Weitzman School in 2010. She joined the faculty in 2015 and has taught core and advanced design studios and professional practice courses in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She has contributed essays to BIO/MATTER/TECHNO/SYNTHETICS (Actar, 2025), edited by Associate Professor of Architecture Franca Trubiano, and The Landscape Project (Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2024), edited by Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture Richard Weller, among other volumes. She has taught landscape architecture at Swarthmore College and Temple University and is pursuing a PhD in Practice-Based Research at Virginia Tech. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Architecture and Urban Studies from Yale University.

Popowsky succeeds Billy Fleming, who co-edited the Center’s first major publication, Design with Nature Now (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2019) with Steiner; Weller; and Karen M’Closkey, associate professor of landscape architecture and editor-in-chief of the department’s interdisciplinary journal LA+. The book’s release coincided with an international conference and exhibition surveying exemplary ecological design around the world that is now on tour in East Asia.