National Advisory Board

Brett Snyder is Professor of Design at the University of California, Davis.

From 2017 to 2023, Snyder served as co-director, with Mallika Bose, of the Imagining America initiative Collective of Publicly Engaged Designers (CoPED). Through this work, he helped advance publicly engaged design as a means of bridging academic and public realms while addressing urgent issues related to climate change and environmental justice. Snyder saw this role as a chance to highlight the positive ways that publicly engaged design is impacting individual locations across the Imagining America network and beyond.

Snyder is a practicing architect and principal of Cheng+Snyder, an Oakland-based architecture and design studio. His research and creative practice operate at the intersection of architecture and media, examining how emerging technologies and forms of representation shape the ways people navigate, understand, and experience the built environment.

His recent projects include California Changing: 50 Sites of Climate Change in Augmented Reality, a book that offers a climate change tour of California; Smart Sidewalks, a winning entry in New York City’s Reinvent Payphones competition; and Public Sediment, an award-winning collaborative project focused on adapting Alameda Creek for sea-level rise. 

Snyder earned a Master of Architecture from Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in design from Carnegie Mellon University.