A Cal Poly Pomona assistant professor is one of 26 in the U.S. to win a 2025 Andrew Carnegie Fellowship.

Aaron Cayer, an assistant professor of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, was the only fellow in architecture, a university news release states.

The Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program is administered by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and supports “high-caliber scholarly research focused on the most pressing issues of our time,” the release states.

This year’s fellows will seek solutions to the nation’s political polarization, the release states.

Cayer teaches the history of architects and the profession, including how they contribute and respond to inequality in the world, the release states. The $200,000 award will allow Cayer and students to “examine the ways that architecture, engineering and construction firms — and the buildings they produce — influence politics in American communities,” according to the release.

“The architecture profession, like most design schools today, clings to ideas that architects shape the world mainly through their signature designs or aesthetics,” Cayer said in the release. “But their greatest economic and political power has historically come from the infrastructural projects and business models we tend to overlook. I think it’s important to understand these projects — and the policies and companies behind them — because they produce and sustain the inequities and divisions that then determine our politics.”

Cayer, who lives in Los Angeles, has won previous awards and fellowships, including the 2024 Rome Prize, which honors architects, artists, scholars and designers; and the Kristine Fallon Prize from the International Archive of Women in Architecture.