Penn State’s Felecia Davis Honored for Her Work in Digital Design

Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Pennsylvania State University, has been named the winner of the 2022 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in the Digital Design category for her work that explores the use of computational textiles. Dr. Davis’s research reimagines how people might use textiles in their daily lives and in architecture through computational textiles, which respond to the environment via programming, embedded sensors, and electronics, as well as use the natural transformable properties of textiles.

“This award was a great surprise, and I am honored to be among such respected colleagues in the 2022 National Design Award cohort,” said Dr. Davis. “Receiving this award is especially encouraging in that it recognizes a body of work that has been happening over a number of years.”

Dr. Davis joined the faculty at Penn State in 2014 and was promoted to associate professor in 2020. Earlier, she taught for 10 years in the School of Architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

Dr. Davis is a graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, where she majored in engineering. She earned a master of architecture degree from Princeton University in New Jersey and a Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.