Architecture doctoral candidate earns scientific excellence award for research

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nastaran Tebyanian, an architecture doctoral candidate in the Penn State College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, recently won a Journal of Digital Landscape Architecture Scientific Excellence Award for a research paper that she authored with her Ph.D. advisers. Tebyanian, who has focused her doctoral studies on landscape architecture, wrote “Uncertainty Considerations in Green Infrastructure Optimization: A Review” with Stuckeman School faculty members Hong Wu, assistant professor of landscape architecture, and Lisa Iulo, associate professor of architecture, as well as Klaus Keller, Hodgson Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Tebyanian was honored with the same award in 2016 for her article titled “Reflecting Time in Computer-aided Landscape Design and Analysis: Developing an Application or Modeling Seasonality and Resiliency in Mall Scale Landscapes.” She also earned a Scientific Merit Award from the same journal in 2020 for “Application of Machine Learning for Urban Landscape Design: A Primer for Landscape Architects.” Tebyanian’s research is supported by the Penn State Initiative for Resilient Communities (PSIRC), a University Strategic Initiative Seed Grant. While pursuing her doctorate, Tebyanian has been a researcher with the Hamer Center for Community Design and she is part of the student cohort LandscapeU, a National Science Traineeship at Penn State that works on problems related to the food energy-water nexus in the Chesapeake Bay and globally. She was also an adjunct researcher with the Rand Corporation. A native of Semnan, Iran, Tebyanian earned a master of applied statistics degree from Penn State in 2019. She holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Art University of Isfahan and a professional master’s degree in landscape architecture from Shahid Beheshti University, both in Iran. Tebyanian successfully defended her dissertation, titled “Green Infrastructure Placement under Deep Uncertainty,” and will graduate with her doctorate from Penn State in August. The Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture houses departments of Architecture, Graphic Design and Landscape Architecture, as well as two research centers: the Hamer Center for Community Design and the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing. For more news from the Stuckeman School, follow us on Twitter @StuckemanNews.