Aaron Cooke is a licensed architect and project manager at NREL's Alaska Campus in Fairbanks. He manages the Sustainable Northern Communities Program, which designs and deploys emerging building technologies and approaches in the Arctic and Subarctic. Cooke's work primarily focuses on durable, affordable, healthy, and sustainable building design in extreme climates and remote locations. He works with architects, builders, technicians, local leaders, and Tribes to design, build, and monitor innovative buildings across the circumpolar north.

Research Interests

Extreme climate building science

Energy efficient building innovations

Community-driven housing design in remote/islanded regions

Disaster preparedness, resiliency, and disaster response in buildings and infrastructure

Building resiliency to climate change in the Arctic

Community planning and relocation

Education

Master of Architecture, University of Cincinnati

Professional Experience

Cooke has work experience across the circumpolar north, with projects in Alaska, Canada, Denmark, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Russia, testing new methods of building durable and energy efficient homes in circumpolar regions.  He has more than a decade of architectural and project management experience for NREL's Alaska Campus in rural Alaska, including residential design and construction, construction management, housing analysis and remediation, disaster preparedness, disaster response, water and sanitation design, workforce training, and logistics/procurement management. He has taught northern architecture and Arctic engineering at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Washington, and the Danish Technical University of Greenland.