Dr. Mahesh Daas serves as the eighth president of the Boston Architectural College, a 135-year-old independent private institution ranked as the fourth-best architecture college in the United States, since 2019. Daas’s academic career spans three decades including nearly twenty years in leadership roles at institutions of diverse sizes, complexities, missions, and locations across the US, including an AAU flagship university with a medical school, two public Research-1 universities, and an independent private institution. Informed by his lived experiences as a first-generation student and a first-generation immigrant, Daas champions the transformational mission of higher education to create a more equitable and just society. Daas has been recognized as an empathetic, inclusive, and visionary leader by Boston Commons magazine, Boston Magazine, and Boston’s NPR station GBH’s Culture Show where he appears monthly on the segment “Actual Intelligence.”
Daas’s interdisciplinary work has been published widely. He is 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). He co-edited Towards a Robotic Architecture (2018, Oro Editions)—the first comprehensive book on robotics in architecture. His latest co-authored AI-illustrated dystopian graphic novella I, Nobot addresses AI and robotics futures.
In 2011, Daas became the youngest educator and the first person of Indian origin to be elevated as an Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Distinguished Professor, the highest national recognition for an architectural educator. Fewer than two percent of architectural educators have been so honored since the inception of the ACSA national career awards program in 1984. 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, robotics, and AI, receiving the 2013 ACADIA Society Award of Excellence. The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (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). Currently, he serves on the editorial board of Construction Robotics, a Springer journal.
Daas has been actively involved with federal funding agencies. In 2011, he co-chaired a National Science Foundation (NSF) symposium and workshop entitled “Research in Materials and Manufacturing for Extreme Affordability” in collaboration with ASME and IEEE. He served as a peer reviewer for the NSF along with joining a 2010 NSF delegation to Israel to explore bilateral research opportunities between the two countries in sustainable buildings and technologies. He has also served on research, higher education, and advisory panels for the Canadian, Indian, and Irish governments.
Alongside his role at the BAC, Daas’s creative spirit extends beyond his professional work: as an award-winning creative writer and poet with an interest in existentialist and Latin American magical realist literature. Honored for creative achievements, leadership, and innovative approaches to teaching, Daas has delivered keynote speeches and lectures at scholarly forums around the globe.
Daas earned a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania with distinction for dissertation in 2013; a master’s degree in urban design from Kansas State University in 1994 with John F. Helm Award for professional promise; and a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India, in 1990 with A.P. Riding Club Gold Medal. He has also received executive certificates in business and nonprofit management from the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University.