Sean Kois

Sean Kois is a landscape and architectural designer and researcher based in Charlottesville, Virginia, working at the intersection of ecological design, natural infrastructure, and federal hazard-adaptation research. He holds a Master of Landscape Architecture and a Master of Architecture from the University of Virginia, alongside a B.A. in Anthropology. Most recently, Sean served as an ORISE Research Fellow with USACE and ERDC's Engineering With Nature program, researching nature-based infrastructure through regional scale methodologies. He helped develop a natural infrastructure playbook for the Great Lakes region, co-authored a 150-plus-page capstone report, and helped facilitate multi-day workshops for over 50 federal stakeholders. He previously contributed to the USACE Four Coasts project, developing coastal resilience concepts for the Great Lakes and San Francisco Bay, and designing protocols and running experiments in laboratory wave basins and riverine models. Sean's background spans anthropology, architecture, and landscape architecture, giving him strong skills in spatial analysis, graphic production, technical layout, and narrative writing. A returned Peace Corps Volunteer, he brings deep experience communicating across institutional and cultural boundaries, and years of hands-on construction work ground his design research in buildability. He is well-positioned to support phased, multi-stakeholder research moving from concept toward real-world implementation.