Bahereh Vojdani

Bahereh Vojdani is a PhD student in the Urban and Regional Planning and Design Program at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research focuses on performance-based approaches to architectural and urban design, with an emphasis on quantitative evaluation of building energy use, daylighting performance, and environmental quality.

Her work integrates building performance simulation techniques—such as energy modeling and daylighting analysis—with artificial intelligence and machine learning methods to support early-stage design and planning decisions. She is particularly interested in hybrid workflows that combine data-driven models with rule-based and physics-informed approaches to improve interpretability, scalability, and decision relevance. Her research aims to translate complex simulation outputs into actionable insights that align with architectural and planning practices.

More broadly, her work contributes to the development of analytical and computational frameworks for sustainable, energy-efficient, and high-performance built environments at both building and urban scales.

Advisors 

Dr. Andressa Martinez

Dr. Deok-Oh Woo

Research Interests/Specializations

• Performance-based architectural and urban design
• Building energy and daylighting simulation
• Artificial intelligence and machine learning in the built environment
• Data-driven, rule-based, and hybrid design methodologies
• Explainable and human-centered AI for design decision support
• Building- and urban-scale environmental analysis
• Sustainable and high-performance building systems
   

Career Ambitions

Bahereh aims to pursue a research-oriented career in academia or research institutions, focusing on the development of advanced computational and AI-driven methods for improving building and urban environmental performance. Her long-term goal is to contribute to interdisciplinary research that bridges architecture, urban planning, and data science, and to advance evidence-based, sustainable design practices through teaching, research, and collaboration with industry and public-sector partners.

Education

• PhD in Urban and Regional Planning and Design, University of Maryland, College Park
• Master’s in Architectural Engineering, Tarbiat Modares University, Tehran, Iran
• Bachelor’s Degree in Architectural Engineering