Trained as an architectural historian and architect, I began researching quality of life in small and shrinking rural communities in Iowa in 2017 with the support of a planning grant from the Smart & Connected Communities Program. I have since received a Track 2 IRG grant to continue this work in collaboration with residents of six small towns in Iowa as well as partners at the Iowa League of Cities and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. We are developing data tools and other resources that will help communities to actively work on stabilizing their quality of life even as they continue to lose population. In another planning grant project through S&CC, I am working with colleagues from engineering, design, and education on a project about STEM aspirations among K-12 students in Storm Lake, a growing town in the rural northwest part of Iowa, where a large meatpacking plant has brought large numbers of migrants and refugees to the community. Before I began working on large-scale, team-based research about Iowa, I worked for more than two decades on historical research about architecture and urbanism in the former Czechoslovakia Czech, and in particular the emergence of prefabricated housing technologies in the early decades of Communist Party rule in the 1940s and 1950s.