Emily McGlohn of Auburn University Rural Studio has been selected by Architectural Record as one of five recipients of the 2025 Women in Architecture Awards. Emily, who wears many hats, is an associate professor and extension specialist in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. In addition to being a registered architect in both Alabama and Virginia, she teaches 3rd-year design studio at Rural Studio in Newbern, Alabama, and coordinates the program’s 3rd-year curriculum. She is passionate about educating students. Emily notes that teaching at Rural Studio and working with students to construct homes for the local community has helped her intimately understand, and therefore critique, contemporary building enclosures, residential design, and client engagement. One of her teaching focal points is developing methods to encourage empathy and observation among her students. In her extension role, she is collaborating to solve urgent rural wastewater issues, working other members of the Alabama Rural Water and Wastewater Consortium, including engineers from the University of Alabama and University of South Alabama. Emily has established Rural Studio as the pilot location for the Consortium’s first decentralized “cluster” wastewater system.

Celebrating its 12th year, the Women in Architecture (WIA) Awards program acknowledges and promotes the accomplishments of women in the profession. The 2025 laureates were selected by a jury composed of past awardees Carol Ross Barney (2022) and Anne Marie Duvall Decker (2023); Julie Hiromoto, partner and director of integration at HKS; climate leader and strategist Yasemin Kologlu; and Mark Gardner of Jaklitsch/Gardner. This year’s laureates will be honored at a ceremony held on September 9 at Mies van der Rohe’s S.R. Crown Hall on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; the following day, Architectural Record will host the latest Sustainability in Practice conference at the same venue. Featured speakers at the event will include Chicago’s own Jeanne Gang, an inaugural WIA Award recipient.

The other distinguished honorees in Emily McGlohn’s awards cohort are Gina Bocra, vice president of the Built Ecology team at WSP; Chandra Robinson, a principal at Portland, Oregon–based Lever Architecture; Roberta Washington, founder of Roberta Washington Projects (RWP), a Harlem-based architectural practice with over 40 years of accomplishments; and Cynthia Weese, a founding partner of Weese Langley Weese and winner of the 2023 AIA Chicago Lifetime Achievement Award. The awardee profiles on Architectural Record are a testament to the honor that the WIA Awards bestow.