Dr. Mahesh Daas, ACSA Distinguished Professor, serves as the eighth president of The Boston Architectural College (BAC). With over thirty years of experience, Dr. Daas has held academic and leadership roles at prominent research universities in Indiana, Kansas, and Texas and at architectural firms in Chicago and Kansas City. He is a designer, academic leader, and author as well as a prolific speaker, poet, and technologist exploring ‘humanness’ in the age of robotics and artificial intelligence. Boston Magazine hailed “The BAC’s Mahesh Daas is on a Mission to Reinvent Design Education.”

Dr. Daas’s prolific interdisciplinary work has been featured in scholarly journals, refereed? exhibitions, conference proceedings, federal publications, and academic books. His most relevant work for this discussion is his 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 Massachusetts Institute of Technology from “the gray factory on the river Charles”, into a world-class university through architecture. It has been hailed as “a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship.”

Dr. Daas earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University, Hyderabad, India, in 1990 with A.P. Riding Club Gold Medal; a master’s degree in urban design from Kansas State University in 1994 with John F. Helm Award for the professional promise; and an executive doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania with distinction for dissertation in 2013. He has also received executive certificates in management from the University of Texas at Austin and Harvard University.