She was Scientific Coordinator at the Holcim Foundation where she curated and organized four concurrent mobile workshops at the 5th Holcim Forum 2016 in Detroit, MI, USA. The mobile workshops enabled participants to visit sites across the Detroit metropolitan region that intersected with the Forum’s theme of “Infrastructure Space” and grounded the symposium’s global discussions with examples that were experienced and discussed in situ.

Her scholarly work examines the environmental and political entanglements of construction, particularly through building materials. Her material retrospective “Beton” was recently shown at the Swiss Architecture Museum in Basel. She is currently working on a book manuscript Opération Béton: Constructing Concrete in Switzerland based on her dissertation.

Sarah Nichols has taught design studios and seminar courses in architecture and urban design. She works independently as an architect and has completed private houses in Germany’s Black Forest and in New Zealand. She was a co-initiator of the temporary project space Die Weinhalde, curating quarterly in-situ artists’ fellowships in a villa near Zurich.

Prior to joining EPFL, she was an Assistant Professor of Architecture (tenure track) at Rice University in Houston.

She studied architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, at the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and received her doctorate (Dr. Sc.) at ETH Zurich where she was awarded the ETH Medal.