A Fellow in the AIA, Michael Pyatok has 37 years of experience, and has served the American Institute of Architects on its National Affordable Housing Task Group. Besides designing and actively participating in the firm's projects, Mike is also a professor of architectural design and the newly appointed Director of the Center for Affordable Homes and the Family at Arizona State University in Phoenix. He continues to lecture about the firm's housing work at many schools of architecture and conferences, and to periodically write for professional journals about issues related to multifamily housing design, the need for more compact transit-related communities and design methods which include citizen participation. He has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune and all major architectural journals. Mike has won twelve out of fourteen design competitions he has entered since 1977, placing second in two. These competitions include diverse projects such as high-density mixed use and affordable housing in New York City and downtown Seattle, West Hollywood's new Civic Center, high-density housing and retail related to a transit station in San Diego and, most recently, high-density housing in downtown Oakland. The National Endowment for the Arts sponsored Mike to run housing design workshops in many diverse cities from Miami to Santa Monica to New Haven and Portland, Oregon. He has been a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright Fellow in Helsinki, Finland. The National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a grant to write a book about how to design higher density affordable housing called "Good Neighbors: Affordable Family Housing." In 2002, Pyatok Architects was chosen as Architecture Firm of the Year by Residential Architect Magazine, and Builder Magazine identified Mike as one of the 12 thought leaders in the field of development.