Selen Okcu

Selen Okcu is currently Lecturer of Architecture at KSU. Before joining KSU, Dr. Okcu was a member of the National Institute of Aerospace Postdoctoral Research Program. She worked as part of an interdisciplinary team located in the Structural Acoustics Branch at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, VA. She received her doctoral degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. She majored in Architecture Culture and Behavior/ Evidence Based Design and minored in Architectural Acoustics areas of the PhD Program. She received both her Master’s degree in Design Computing and Bachelor`s degree in Architectural Design from Istanbul Technical University, College of Architecture. Over the past years, she has been deeply involved in multi-disciplinary research and design teaching. As a researcher, she has been collaborating with researchers from different disciplines including  engineering, medicine, psychology, and architecture.  Her research interests include human response to aircraft noise and hospital noise; relating design to user outcomes such as job stress, productivity and health; developing effective ways to measure environmental qualities of physical settings and linking architectural design to acoustic outcomes. In 2009, she was awarded a Newman Medal from the Acoustical Society of America for excellence in the study of architectural acoustics. She has received more awards from professional organizations for her acoustics research including the Martin Hirshorn IAC Prize, ASHRAE Graduate Student Award. Recently, her research that relates layout design to acoustic outcomes has been awarded by Boston Society of Architects. She has been also awarded for her work on school environments by Emory University. Her doctoral research was awarded a King Student Medal by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium in 2011.

Specialties: Architectural acoustics, Psychoacoustics,  Environmental-design research, Evidence-based healthcare design research, Post-occupancy evaluation, Research linking green school design and student health - education