Professional Biography
Dr. Mahesh Daas serves as the eighth president of the Boston Architectural College, a 134-year-old independent private institution. Daas’s academic career spans three decades involving leadership roles at institutions of diverse sizes, complexities, missions, and locations across the U.S., including an AAU flagship university with a medical school, two public Research-1 universities, and an independent private institution. He has been recognized as an empathetic, inclusive, and visionary leader by Boston Commons magazine and Boston Magazine. He appears regularly on The Culture Show on NPR's Boston station, GBH 89.7.
Daas holds a doctorate in higher education management from Penn GSE, a master's degree in urban design from Kansas State University, and a bachelor's degree in architecture from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India.
Daas’s interdisciplinary work has been featured in scholarly journals, refereed exhibitions, conference proceedings, federal publications, and academic books. He was the author of the critically acclaimed book on academic leadership Leading with Aesthetics: The Transformational Leadership of President Charles M. Vest at M.I.T. (Lexington Books, 2015, 2019). The book chronicles how Vest and his team helped transform MIT from “the gray factory on the river Charles” into a world-class university through architecture. He co-edited Towards a Robotic Architecture (2018, Applied Research and Design Publishing) — the first comprehensive book on robotics in architecture. His latest co-authored book, I, Nobot (2023, Oro Editions), is fully illustrated with AI and explores humanity in the age of AI and robots.
In 2011 Daas was elevated as an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor, the highest national recognition for an architectural educator. Daas served as the 2021–2022 Chancellor of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors.
Daas has also been recognized for his longstanding contributions to design computing including receiving the 2013 Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Society Award of Excellence. ACADIA has also elected him twice as its president. Additionally, Dr. Daas has been elected three times to serve on the editorial board of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (Sage Publications). He currently serves on the editorial board of Construction Robotics, a Springer journal.
