School Notes: School of Architecture
July/August 2026

Honors for architecture PhDs

Lisa Beyeler-Yvarra ’26PhD (architecture and religious studies) has been awarded the Tsao Family Rome Prize in the category of East-West Intersections: Arts, Ideas, Attitudes for her research project “New Dispensations: Catholic Property, Global Capital, and the Making of the Transpacific.” Focusing on the Asia-Pacific, a region key to the future of global Catholicism and global climate change, her dissertation examines how Catholic property systems multiplied in majority-Catholic capitals from 1945 to the present. 

Rome Prize winners are selected annually by independent juries composed of distinguished artists and scholars. YSoA senior critic Christopher Hawthorne ’93 served on the jury this year for the architecture and landscape architecture category. There are many Rome Prize residents and awardees on the faculty as well. The most recent is Diana Balmori Associate Professor Anthony Acciavatti, who received the Gilmore D. Clarke and Michael Rapuano | Kate Lancaster Brewster Rome Prize in 2025 for his research project “Groundwater Earth: The World Before and After the Tubewell.”

Devin Jernigan ’28PhD (architecture) has been selected as Yale’s Esri Innovation Program Student of the Year 2026. This award recognizes “outstanding student achievement in developing novel tools or techniques for geospatial analysis using Esri’s ArcGIS platform.” Jernigan was selected for a project that transforms fragmented, handwritten archival circus ledgers into data-driven maps that reveal the economic drivers behind the American traveling circus.