Dr. Farhana Ferdous is an educator, designer, and scholar whose design and research career spans the continent of Asia, Australia, and North America. She is well known across the globe for her scholarly contribution to healthy urbanism specializing in the area of environmental design for the elderly, community health, and wellbeing at urban scales. She is the co-editor of the forthcoming book All Inclusive Engagement in Architecture,  which is a first major effort to bring together academic scholarships and design projects to critically discuss how built environment and urbanism could be re-articulated to bring broader community well-being. 

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Dr. Ferdous was a Global Urban Fellow and lecturer (2012-2017) at the University of Kansas. In 2017, she joined Department of Architecture at Howard University as Assistant Professor and has a doctorate from the University of Sydney, Australia. Her teaching focuses on sustainable urbanism, healthcare architecture and designing healthy communities by developing interactive and action-based learning. She believes in two facets of architecture: ‘environment’ and ‘design’, which should be well integrated within students’ design studio experience, as well as establishing their symbiotic interconnections. Her philosophical stance on ‘evidence-based learning’ is that it should encourage students to study action-based phenomena that will assist them in connecting their design studio experience to the broader healthy environment at urban and neighborhood scale.

 

Her pedagogical interests involve designing healthy communities and sustainable urban spaces from that evidence-based environmental design perspective. Her studio explores ways of enhancing sustainable environmental design by studying urban design, community health, and wellness at urban and regional scales. Her commitment to environmental research brings new perspectives to existing architectural knowledge and encourages critical analysis of urban and healthcare design practices. She consistently encourages her students to study contemporary phenomena that will help them contextualize their studio learning from the broader perspective of social realities.

 

Her current scholarly activity focuses on the nexus between resilient space, community participation, walkable neighborhood, and urbanism, specializing in the area of environmental design for the elderly. She is working on multiple research grants related to the theme of resilient lifestyles as integral elements of both human longevity and sustainability. One of Dr. Ferdous’s ongoing research topics is to explicitly analyze the physical characteristics of neighborhood walking routes using rigorous space syntax and walking route assessment tools. Other research analyzes the relationships between levels of social interaction, visibility, and the proximity of spatial configurations in long-term care facilities. Her ambition for this environmental research is to bring new perspectives to existing architectural knowledge and to encourage critical analysis of contemporary design practices. This research is intricately connected to her philosophy that environmental study should ground and contextualize students’ consciousness within existing economic, cultural, and environmental situations.

 

From 2011 to 2014, she worked as a post-doctoral fellow focusing on healthy community, healthcare at urban scale and environmental design for the elderly at KU. In 2012, she received a Ph.D. on Environment Behavioral Study and Urban Morphology from the University of Sydney at Australia. Her research has received many prestigious awards, grants and scholarships including the Toyota Foundation Grant, Academy of Architecture for Health Foundation (AAHF), American Association of University Women (AAUW) International Fellowship; a Grantmakers in Aging (GIA) fellowship; an Endeavour Post Graduate Award (EPA), and numerous scholarships from the Bangladesh Government. She is the author of several peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and her recent publications have appeared or are forthcoming in American Journal of Alzheimer's Disease and Other Dementias, Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), Urban Design International (UDI), Sage Open Journal, and Journal of Advances in Humanities.