Sara holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture from the University of Michigan. She is currently in the MLA program in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is interested in urban residential and everyday landscapes, and her research focuses nearby nature and wellbeing. More specifically, she studies how planning and design-related attributes of the environment and proximity to nature may affect people’s wellbeing through neighborhood satisfaction and use patterns. Using an interdisciplinary approach, her work makes linkages between findings in environmental psychology, urban planning and design with the goal of providing people-oriented evidence-based solutions. These solutions are expected to be translated into applicable planning and design guidelines to help practitioners and decision-makers improve the quality of life in urban neighborhoods. Sara has been recognized as the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s 2018 University Olmsted Scholar for her efforts in research and leadership in the field.
Dr. Bryan Reiley is an Avian Ecologist who works at the Illinois Natural History Survey(INHS). Broadly, Bryan's work focuses on understanding the factors that influence wildlife-habitat relationships. In particular, he is interested in understanding the habitat selection process in birds and how habitat selection decisions influence fitness outcomes. Bryan is currently working on a project evaluating how temporal and landscape trends influence arthropod abundance and diversity using a long term data set collected by the Critical Trends Assessment Program at the INHS. Additionally, Bryan and Dr. Bill Stewart are working on a grant from the the United States Fish and Wildlife Service to investigate what factors are limiting the continuation and expansion of grass based agriculture, an important agricultural practice to grassland birds, in the Midwest.