Inaugural Ann Noble Research Award Presentation

Dr Ann Noble was a prolific researcher, teacher, architect practitioner and Chair of Architects for Health for ten years, followed by her becoming Joint President together with Professor Ray Moss. Ann’s contribution to and leadership of Architects for Health through her energy and determination took the society to new heights: she corralled her wide range of contacts into events and debates as well as increasing membership and the influence and fortunes of the society.

Ann passed away a couple of years ago and the Ann Noble Research Award has been set up to celebrate her work and research interests. The award is made to a student taking the Bartlett Real Estates Institute Healthcare Facilities MSc and is specifically to be used for the furtherance of an MSc dissertation.

The BREI Master course is in its first year and has been reconfigured to be run remotely since March. Teaching and tuition have continued as well as provisions for dissertations, proposal for which were submitted a few weeks ago. Four dissertation outlines were put forward for the award in 2020.

An evaluation team of Paul Noble (Ann’s husband), Dr Hina Lad (representing AfH Executive), Dr Evangelia Chrysikou (MSc Program Director) and Paul Mercer (award administrator for AfH) reviewed the four proposals and made a recommendation.

With the assistance of colleagues at UCL, an award ceremony was held on Monday 29^th June with contributions from the evaluation team and introductions from Prof Andrew Edkins (Head of BREI) and Christopher Shaw (Chair of AfH). A recording of the award ceremony can be viewed here.

The award was presented to Masters student Eleni Tsiantou for her dissertation subject “Are the waiting areas in hospitals perceived as therapeutic spaces and does their design contribute to that purpose?”

To further enhance the close collaboration between AfH and BREI, four members of AfH have kindly offered to mentor each of the four dissertation students, who continue to work remotely, The AfH mentors are Dr Hina Lad, Caroline Mulholland, Gareth Banks and Carole Crane.

We look forward to the completed research dissertations and will be inviting Eleni and her three fellow students to present their work to AfH by an appropriate means in the next few months.