Dr. Mahesh Daas is an entrepreneurial institution builder, a thought leader on artificial intelligence, robotics, and entrepreneurship through design, and the author of four books.

He serves as President and chief executive of the Boston Architectural College, a 137-year-old independent college with a distinctive practice-integrated educational model serving an increasingly graduate, online, and working-professional population. Appointed in 2019 and reappointed to a second five-year term in 2024, he leads institutional strategy, academic affairs, enrollment, finance, advancement, technology, accreditation, external relations, and organizational performance in partnership with a 24-member fiduciary Board of Trustees. He came to the presidency following two decades of academic leadership in R-1 research universities, including as Dean of the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Kansas and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

Much of his career has been shaped by a deceptively simple question that has grown more urgent in the drastically reconfigured landscape of U.S. higher education: how does a strong institution deliberately change its trajectory? Long before becoming a president, he studied that question at the University of Pennsylvania through the exemplar case of MIT’s transformation between 1990 and 2004 from an institute of technology into one of the world’s leading comprehensive universities. That research became Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of Charles M. Vest at MIT (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), which examines how Vest and his team repositioned an already distinguished institution through a bold master plan connecting academics, philanthropy, governance, student life, institutional identity, and design thinking. Michael Useem, the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management and Director of the Center for Leadership and Change Management at Wharton, described the book as a compelling case for leaders to see their enterprise’s outward design as conveying its inner purpose. For the past three years, Dr. Daas has taught design thinking to higher-education leaders worldwide as Affiliate Faculty in Penn’s Global Higher Education Management program.

Under his leadership the BAC has recorded seven consecutive years of enrollment growth, earned Hispanic-Serving Institution designation, secured the first seven-figure gifts in its 137-year history, and been ranked #4 (2024) and #8 (2025) nationally by Niche among Best Colleges for Architecture, alongside MIT, Yale, Washington University, UC Berkeley, USC, and Carnegie Mellon. According to federal College Scorecard data, BAC Bachelor of Architecture graduates earn more five years after graduation than those of any other program in the country, and Master of Architecture graduates rank second.

Dr. Daas is a recognized leader in Mixed Reality Master Planning, entrepreneurship through design, and design thinking for higher-education leaders. He advises startups in the Suffolk Technologies accelerator and appears monthly on GBH’s The Culture Show, Boston’s NPR affiliate, in the segment “AI: Actual Intelligence.”