Sylvia Lavin is a head of the Ph.D. in Architecture program and Professor of Architectural History and Theory at UCLA, where she was Chairperson of the department of Architecture and Urban Design from 1996 to 2006. Lavin is also a frequent visitor at Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a Visiting Professor of Architectural Theory at Princeton University's School of Architecture. She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Canadian Centre for Architecture. A leading figure in current debates, Lavin is known both for her scholarship and for her criticism in contemporary architecture and design. Lavin has been a Fellow and a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, and is the recipient of a 2011 Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Lavin curated the exhibition "Take Note" at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 2010, exploring pivotal moments in the relationship between writing and architecture. Her publications include The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity will be published by MIT in 2009 and she is working on a series of exhibitions on design culture of the late 1960s. She is an editor of Crib Sheets, a compilation of polemical writings and sound bites on current buzzwords issued by Monacelli Press and her Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2005. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University (GSAPP) and her B.A. from Barnard College.