- Dec 1, 2023
- Social Impact + Justice, Alumni
The architect who shattered the glass ceiling in India
When she was 16, Ponni Mukundan Concessao, M.S. ’89 walked into one of India’s premier technical colleges and demanded a seat in the undergraduate architecture program. The Principal said they didn’t accept girls, citing security concerns. She quoted the Indian Constitution, which guarantees gender equality and went on to pursue legal action. “For me, it was that or an arranged marriage,” she recalled.
She became the first woman undergraduate at the National Institute of Technology’s
Armin Mostafavi
Armin Mostafavi is a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University’s Design and Augmented Intelligence Lab (DAIL) in the Department of Human-Centered Design. His interdisciplinary research merges architecture, environmental psychology, and neuroscience, focusing on how built environments influence human behavior and cognition. Through innovative biofeedback and behavioral frameworks, Dr. Mostafavi aims to enhance architectural design by understanding and leveraging human responses.
Since 2019, he has worked on NIH-, NSF-, and NIDILRR-funded research projects led
Fran Kozen
John Elliott
I have three areas of expertise in teaching, involving three types of design literacies. These are visual literacy in design (DEA 1101), material literacy in design (DEA 2422) and ecological literacy in design (DEA 4220).
My research interests are related to the idea of "Nature inside" both in a theoretical and a practical sense. In the theoretical domain, I am interested in the aspects of material culture of the built environment that express a society's