About
Shermeen Yousif is a designer, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and architecture. An architect by training, she investigates how emerging AI systems can expand the creative and performative capacities of design—reframing the computer not as a drafting tool but as a generative, goal-driven collaborator. Her research develops interconnected and agentic AI workflows that translate design intention into architectural form, positioning design intelligence as an emergent property of distributed computational systems trained on aesthetically innovative and high-performing architectural datasets.
She is an Associate Professor of Architecture at The University of Texas at Arlington and a 100-RISE Presidential Hire, where she is the founding Director of the Performative AI Lab. Conceived as both a research facility and a studio classroom, the lab investigates the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the design of spatial systems, emphasizing performance-driven methodologies that respond to ecological and experiential parameters. Pairing a curved high-resolution LED visualization wall with a programmable robotic arm, it is a space where AI-generated design environments, computer vision, agentic AI, and physical robotic fabrication intersect—shaping form, behavior, and adaptation across scales, from materials to urban systems.
Previously, Yousif was a tenure-track Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Florida Atlantic University, where she directed the Environmental Design and Natural Materials (EDNM) Lab. She is also the founder and director of the Deep-Ecology Design Studio, a research-driven practice that integrates generative AI methodologies with environmental performance simulation to pursue Net-Zero building designs, resilience, and decarbonization in architecture.
Her research has produced a body of computational methods and frameworks for augmenting generative and performance-driven design systems, published across leading venues in architectural computation including ACADIA, CAAD Futures, and CAADRIA. Her work has been recognized with numerous honors, among them the AIA Fort Lauderdale Award for Research (2024), the AIA Florida Award for Research (2022, 2024), the AIA Fort Lauderdale Educator of the Year Award (2023), and the FAU Broward Faculty of the Year Award (2024). She has delivered keynotes and invited lectures at national and international venues—including a keynote on AI and architecture at Perkins Eastman’s Technology Marathon (2023), the Smart Cities Miami Conference (2024), and Robotics-2025 in Tokyo—and has been a featured speaker at DigitalFutures. She serves on the ACADIA Board of Directors (2023–2025) and the editorial board of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (2025–2027), and is currently editing a book on AI and ecological design that examines the state of the field and its projections for intelligent design futures.
Committed to preparing the next generation of designers for a rapidly changing profession, Yousif teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios in which students learn not only to use AI tools but to build workflows, train their own models, and encode their own performance goals and design intentions into the systems they create.
She holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from Texas A&M University (2019), where her dissertation developed a machine-learning shape-clustering method for generative design and optimization. She earned her Master of Architecture from the Dessau Institute of Architecture at the Bauhaus, Anhalt University, Germany (2009), on a fully funded German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship, and her Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from the University of Baghdad (2006).