UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Patrick Hickey, a spring 2025 graduate of the professional master of architecture degree program in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, was named the winner of the Department of Architecture’s 2025 Jawaid Haider Award for Design Excellence in Graduate Studies for his thesis that questions how effective the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been in the built environment since its establishment in 1991.

The Pittsburgh native’s work, titled “Prosthetic House,” was inspired by his role as a caretaker for his severely disabled mother, Jacquelyn McCormick Hickey, who was diagnosed with progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a rare brain disease that has a life expectancy of six months.

“She has lived 13 years and counting beyond her diagnosis, but PML has left her unable to move her body or speak, all while her mind is still completely intact,” Hickey said. “Being her caretaker over the years showed me how ill-equipped our built world is for the non-able-bodied person, which led me to pursuing architecture and ultimately led to my thesis project.”

Hickey’s initial research for his thesis started in disability studies which led to him researching the wide field of body prosthetics and body horror, a sub-genre that focuses on unnatural transformation, degeneration or destruction of the human body.

“I started off my thesis with the hopes of designing exaggerated prosthetics that would interact with the architecture they inhibit,” he explained.