About Mahesh
Mahesh Daas is the national ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Chairperson of Indiana’s only state-supported department of architecture at Ball State University, where he was also the inaugural 2008-11 Emerging Media Fellow of the university’s Center for Media Design. Previously, Professor Daas served as the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research of the College of Architecture (1000 FTE students, 37 FTE faculty) at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is licensed to practice architecture in India, and worked with architectural firms in Chicago and Kansas City. Under his leadership, Ball State University department of architecture (335 FTE students, 32 FTE faculty) has been ranked by Architect magazine among top three schools of architecture in the area of digital design, and among top six schools of architecture in the area of social justice. In 2012, Professor Daas has been elevated to the membership of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors, and accorded the title ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture in perpetuity, an honor bestowed on less than 2.5% of architectural educators in North America.
An academic polyglot, Professor Daas has been educated in architecture, urban design, business, and higher education management at, respectively, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University; Kansas State University; the University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Pennsylvania, where he is completing an innovative Executive Doctorate in higher education.
Professor Daas relishes the interdisciplinary intersections between design, technology, critical theory, urbanism, innovation, leadership, social justice, and higher education. His work is evenly distributed between design practice, design-build, critical theory, and applied research. He has been a keynote speaker at conferences in the US and South America. He has published over sixty refereed papers, book chapters, journal articles, and juried design projects, some of which have won best paper awards. At UT San Antonio, he won the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Production. He is a co-recipient of a 2001 Kansas City AIA Merit Award for the Baron BMW Dealership building, and a 2007 recipient of International Fabrics Foundation Outstanding Achievement Award for the design and construction of Advanced Fabrics Exhibition.
ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) has elected Professor Daas twice to the organization’s presidency. He serves on the advisory board of iDMAa (International Digital Media and Arts Association); on the editorial board member of IJAC (International Journal of Architectural Computing); and on the board of the Indiana Architectural Foundation. He has been a peer-reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and served on the NSF delegation to Israel in 2010 to explore bilateral research opportunities in sustainable materials and technologies. He has chaired a recent NSF symposium and workshop on Extreme Affordability, and has also served on research review panels for the Canadian Government. In 2012, Professor Daas was part of the US-Ireland higher education summit in Dublin.
Also an award-winning fiction writer and poet, Professor Daas draws inspiration from the existentialist and magic-realist writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Born in India, Professor Daas has been living in the United States since 1991, and resides in Muncie, Indiana with his wife and two children.
A Special Note
My beloved father passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in August, 2010. As a tribute to him, to gratefully acknowledge his love, dedication and perseverance in evolving his family from penury to prosperity, to perpetuate his legacy, and to reflect the personal transformation that I have undergone since his passing, I have taken on one of his given names, Daas, as my new family name. I am fortunate to have had such an extraordinary father, a special individual admired by all who have known him. Therefore, after much consideration I have officially modified my name from Mahesh Senagala to a personally more meaningful Mahesh Daas.
The name change came into effect from May 31, 2011
