Five Arts and Architecture grad students honored with University awards

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Five graduate students in the College of Arts and Architecture were recently recognized with awards that highlight their impact across the university, specifically in the areas of scholarship, teaching, outreach and mentorship. The annual awards are sponsored by the Office of the President and administered by the Fox Graduate School.

Yasaman Ghaffarian, who is pursuing concurrent master of architecture and master of science in architecture degrees, was recognized with the Professional Master’s Excellence Award. Her work bridges architectural theory and practice through exceptional scholarly achievement, design vision and research contributions. Her capstone project, "Micro‑Urban Living: Adaptive Housing Solutions for Irregular Urban Lots," challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes buildable land in dense global cities. By analyzing spatial, regulatory and economic conditions in cities like Boston, Ghaffarian demonstrates how narrow, triangular and residual parcels, typically dismissed as unusable, can support fully functional micro‑housing.

Drawing on precedents such as Takamitsu Azuma’s "Tower House" and Gordon Matta‑Clark’s "Fake Estates," she developed prototype housing models that maintained livability within 200–600 square feet through modular furniture, transformable interiors and reliance on surrounding urban amenities. Faculty commend the project for its rigor, originality, and exceptional graphic and analytical clarity.

Beyond her capstone project, Ghaffarian has contributed to research publications, international conference presentations and community‑engaged affordable‑housing initiatives. Her research and design proposal offers a replicable, globally transferable framework that positions architecture as both a critical lens and practical instrument for addressing urban housing shortages, and exemplifies the highest standards of professional architectural education.

Nathan D. Manna, an art history master’s student, and Deebak Tamilmani, a master’s student in architecture, were named recipients of the Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award.

Manna’s work fuses medievalism and queer theory to introduce the concept of “queer relics,” which describes how contemporary artists transform bodily traces, intimate objects and charged mementos into sacral objects that preserve memory, desire and devotion. Building off Catholic reliquary traditions, his research traces how queer artists appropriate and reconfigure sacred forms to produce new modes of memorialization and presence, building archives that register lives and losses often excluded from institutional histories. Going beyond the written thesis, Manna extends these ideas through practice-as-research, where his art practice acts as a laboratory embodying and putting theory into action. He currently is working on an installation that crystalizes the ideas of his thesis into a tangible form that can be viewed and experienced — a novel contribution to the field of art history. Manna’s thesis will be appearing in a special issue of the journal Different Visions in 2027.

His research has been extensively supported with competitive grants, including from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been invited to present his research at prestigious venues, including the Clark Art Institute, and he is the recipient of the College of Arts and Architecture’s Creative Achievement Award and an Alumni Association Graduate Fellow scholarship through the Fox Graduate School.

Tamilmani was recognized for a thesis that stands at the forefront of AI-assisted design. His research embeds large language models into the architectural drafting software Rhinoceros 3D, enabling users to generate and modify digital geometry through natural language, spoken or typed. By lowering the steep learning curve associated with traditional modeling interfaces, his system expands access for students, professionals and designers with disabilities.

Tamilmani developed two complementary technical pathways: fine‑tuning language models on Rhinoceros‑specific data to produce Python scripts for complex operations, and implementing tool‑calling mechanisms that allow the model to invoke predefined functions for simpler commands. His advisor describes the scholarship as potentially “radical” in reshaping how designers draw and collaborate.

Already recognized with a Rising Researcher Grant through Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences, a provisional patent and multiple conference publications, Tamilmani pairs technical rigor with thoughtful mentorship of undergraduate students. His thesis demonstrates how AI can become an active collaborator in creative workflows, and it signals a promising future for equitable, intelligent design tools.

Houman Riazi Jorshari, an architecture doctoral candidate, was recognized with the Alumni Association Dissertation Award for research that repositions Iranian architecture within global Cold War history.

His dissertation examines how architecture operated as a medium of ideological negotiation in Cold War Iran, where American capitalism and Soviet socialism exerted competing pressures. Through the intertwined careers of architect‑theorist Noureddin Kianouri and feminist activist Maryam Firouz, both leading figures in the Iranian communist party of Tudeh, Riazi shows how debates on development, housing, gender and state power circulated across Tehran, Moscow and East Berlin.

Drawing on newly translated archival materials and extensive research across multiple international repositories, his scholarship challenges the portrayal of Iran as a peripheral Cold War site. Instead, he reveals Iran as an active participant in shaping and reshaping competing models of modernities. Faculty lauded his intellectual rigor, original contributions and leadership in teaching and scholarly communities, noting that his research is poised to influence future studies of Iranian architecture and political history.

A doctoral candidate in architecture, Nusrat Tabassum was recognized for exceptional instructional leadership across design foundations, computational methods and advanced fabrication with the Harold F. Martin Graduate Assistant Outstanding Teaching Award.

Her teaching philosophy centers on connecting creative design thinking with real‑world problem solving through collaborative, iterative and hands‑on learning.

With more than four years of teaching experience at Penn State, she has played a central role in the course "Additive Manufacturing of Concrete Structures," guiding interdisciplinary cohorts through computational modeling, robotic 3D concrete printing, Grasshopper workflows and toolpath development. Her clarity, patience and individualized support help students navigate technically demanding material with confidence. In fall 2025, Tabassum expanded her impact to the "Basic Design" architecture course, supporting more than 130 second-year architectural engineering students as they developed core design skills. Faculty described her as empathetic, dedicated and consistently willing to go beyond expected hours, whether leading technical workshops, assisting with lab research, or mentoring new researchers at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing.

Students credited Tabassum with transforming uncertainty into excitement, especially when entering advanced fabrication environments. Her multidisciplinary expertise and commitment to inclusive, supportive teaching make her an outstanding representative of graduate education at Penn State.