Photo courtesy CMU
Omar Khan has been appointed as the head of the school of architecture (SoA) at the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, effective August 1. Khan joins CMU from the department of architecture at the University at Buffalo (UB).
Khan served as UB department chair for seven years, during which time he initiated new graduate programs, developed industry collaborations, and shepherded facility improvements.
Khan’s research and creative activities span architecture, installation/performance art, and digital design and fabrication.
Khan was also a co-director of the Sustainable Manufacturing and Advanced Robotics Technology (SMART) Community of Excellence, where researchers across architecture, engineering, computing, and management collaborate with industry to explore robotic technologies for manufacturing.
Khan received his bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell University and a master in design and computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. His national and international exhibits include the Incheon Digital Art Festival (Korea), Urban Screens Melbourne, ZeroOne San Jose, Storefront for Art and Architecture, the National Building Museum, and the Urban Center. He is a fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts and has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the U.S. Department of Education. He is the co-principal, with Laura Garófalo, of Liminal Projects, an architectural research office, and partner with Jordan Geiger in Gekh, a design consultancy.
“I could not be more pleased with the head search committee and their success in recruiting Omar Khan as the next head of the SoA,” said Steve Lee, head of SoA. “Omar’s work at UB is congruent with the work at the SoA and CMU—from experiential learning to computational design to creating innovative industrial partnerships—he is the perfect fit to take the school to the next level of accomplishment.”
