Mahesh Daas

Dr. Mahesh Daas is the eighth president of the 133-year-old, independent private Boston Architectural College. His academic career spans 30 years, with 18 years of leadership experience at various public and private institutions across the United States. Daas holds an Executive Doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania and previously served as the dean of the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Kansas. He has been acknowledged as an empathetic, inclusive, and visionary leader by Boston Common magazine and Boston Magazine.

Daas is an award-winning creative writer and poet interested in existentialist and Latin American magical realist literature. He earned his doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, a master's in urban design from Kansas State University in 1994, and a bachelor's in architecture from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India, in 1990. He has received executive certificates in business and nonprofit management from the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University.

His creative achievements, leadership, and innovative teaching methods have been widely recognized. As a designer and scholar, Daas focuses on the 'humanness' aspect in the age of robotics and AI. He currently serves on the editorial board of Construction Robotics, a Springer journal.

An accomplished interdisciplinary scholar, Daas has contributed to a diverse array of platforms including academic journals, curated exhibitions, conference proceedings, federal publications, and scholarly books. His work, Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of President Charles M. Vest at M.I.T. (Lexington Books, 2015, 2019), has been hailed as a "tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship." Daas also co-edited the critically acclaimed book Towards a Robotic Architecture (2018, Oro Editions), which was honored as the Top Tech Book of 2018 by Architect's Newspaper, New York.

In his most recent endeavor, Daas co-authors the innovative and ambitious I, Nobot (Oro Editions, 2023), an AI-augmented graphic novella. This groundbreaking human-AI collaboration intricately weaves together a spectrum of potential human futures, encompassing both idyllic utopias and stark dystopias, while examining the profound impact of artificial intelligence and robotics on society.

In 2011, Daas became the first person of Indian origin to be an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor. He served as the 2021-2022 Chancellor of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors. Daas has been recognized for his contributions to design computing, including receiving the 2013 ACADIA Society Award of Excellence, and has been elected president of ACADIA twice. He has also been elected three times to the editorial board of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (Sage Publications).