Architecture graduate student wins award to attend sustainable cities symposium

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Nastaran Tebyanian, a Ph.D. candidate in architecture with a focus on landscape architecture, won an award that will cover her expenses to travel and attend the Global Symposium on Sustainable Cities and Neighborhoods Oct. 23-25 in Chicago. Tebyanian applied for the award through the symposium and was selected to attend the event, which is designed to explore local approaches to sustainable urban development, particularly at the intersection of climate change mitigation and poverty alleviation. A researcher with the Stuckeman School’s Hamer Center for Community Design, Tebyanian’s dissertation focuses on the role of green infrastructure in the resilience of urban food-energy-water nexus. She is also part of the student cohort of LandscapeU, a National Science Foundation Traineeship at Penn State that works on problems related to the food-energy-water nexus in the Chesapeake Bay and globally. Tebyanian is concurrently pursuing a master of applied statistics at Penn State, which she will receive in December. She also holds a master of science in landscape architecture from the University. A native of Semnan, Iran, Tebyanian earned her bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Art University of Isfahan and her professional master’s in landscape architecture from Shahid Beheshti University, both in Iran. Hosted by the UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, and the University of Chicago’s Mansueto Institute for Urban Innovation, the symposium assembles leading urban practitioners, community organizations, researchers, policy makers and businesses working to create a networked approach to implementing the New Urban Agenda as a means to localize the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.