Design Psychologist To Speak About Campus Planning
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Oct. 7, 2005
Kathleen McPartland
530-898-4260
Design Psychologist To Speak About Campus Planning
Susan Painter, PhD, a design psychologist known for her illustrated lectures on campus planning and brain development, will speak at California State University, Chico on Wednesday, Oct. 19, from 2-4 p.m. in PAC 134. Painter, invited to campus by President Paul Zingg and Vice President of Business and Finance Dennis Graham, will discuss how our responses to the campus-and to any physical environment-are hard-wired in our brains. These responses come from our ancestors’ choices of environments that improved their chances of survival.
She will also explore how the physical elements commonly used to plan college and university campuses affect faculty, staff and, especially, the experiences of students, who are experiencing a significant peak in their brain development.
Painter is a senior urban and university campus planner with AC Martin Partners, Inc., a planning, architecture and engineering firm with offices in Los Angeles and Sacramento that helped produce CSU, Chico’s revised Master Plan. They are consulting architects to the campus.
Previously a tenured associate professor of psychology and architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, Painter has taught in the UCLA Architecture, Interior and Environmental Design program for the past 13 years.
Painter was elected a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association in 1991 for her distinguished service to the field of psychology. She has served as a campus planner for a number of California universities, including the CSU campuses at Fullerton, Northridge and Humboldt, the University of Southern California, and Caltech.
Her background as a specialist in human behavior and her experience as a university professor provide her with a unique perspective on the impact of the campus plan and its buildings on students, faculty, staff and visitors.
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