FarhanaFERDOUS
educator-designer-scholar
About Me
Farhana Ferdous, Ph.D. is an educator, designer, and scholar whose design and research career spans Asia, Australia, and North America. She is globally recognized for her scholarly contributions to healthy urbanism, specializing in environmental design for the elderly, with a focus on Alzheimer's disease and dementia, community health, and well-being at urban scales. Dr. Ferdous is the co-editor of two significant edited volumes: All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture, and (Re) Designing the Continuum of Care for Older Adults,
These works are major efforts to bridge academic scholarship and design practice, critically discussing how built and urban environments can be re-designed and re-articulated to enhance the well-being of older adults and the broader community. Her research has been supported by numerous fellowships, awards, and grants from prestigious and widely acclaimed organizations.
Farhana Ferdous, Ph.D. is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at Howard University. After receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia, in 2012, she served as a post-doctoral fellow in healthcare architecture, lecturer, and Global Urbanism Faculty Fellow in the School of Architecture & Design at the University of Kansas (2012-2017). She joined the Department of Architecture at Howard University in 2017. Her teaching focuses on sustainable urbanism, healthcare architecture, and designing healthy communities through interactive and action-based learning.
Dr. Ferdous believes in two facets of architecture: ‘environment’ and ‘design’, which should be well integrated within students’ design studio experience, establishing their symbiotic interconnections. Her philosophical stance on ‘evidence-based learning’ encourages students to study action-based phenomena, assisting them in connecting their design studio experience to the broader healthy environment at urban and neighborhood scales. She continues to make symbiotic interconnections between design, practice, and research, focusing especially on health, design, and marginalized or aging populations. Dr. Ferdous is the recipient of the prestigious ARCC New Research Award in 2022.
Her current scholarly activity focuses on the nexus between resilient space, community participation, walkable neighborhoods, and urbanism, specializing in 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. 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.
Dr. Ferdous has published widely on urban and environmental design and environmental psychology for the elderly. Her co-edited volumes All In: All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture (Routledge, 2021) and (Re) designing the Continuum of Care for Older Adults: The Future of Long-Term Care Settings (Springer, 2023) are groundbreaking critical discourses focusing on the impact of social engagement in architecture and the design of care facilities for older adults. Her scholarship has been supported by several research grants, including the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Fellowship (2013), Grantmakers in Aging (GIA) Fellowship (2013), Academy of Architecture for Health Foundation (2017), Toyota Individual Research Grant (2018), Graham Foundation Grant (2021), Alzheimer’s Association Research Grant (2021), Innovations in Pedagogy/Teaching Fellowship (2021), and National Endowment for Humanities Fellowship (2022).
© 2024 by Farhana Ferdous.