Rana El-Dabaa

Dr. Rana El-Dabaa is an Assistant Professor at the School of Energy, Geoscience, Infrastructure and Society (EGIS) at Heriot-Watt University Dubai (HWUD). Her experience in teaching includes architecture design studios, computation design, additive manufacturing, responsive design, and environmental design.

Before joining HWUD, Dr. Rana has taught architecture for over a decade in RIBA-accredited architecture schools, in addition to giving several international workshops for undergraduates and post-graduate students. She believes in research-led education and hands-on pedagogical approaches.

Dr. Rana is an active researcher with extensive experience in Design Computing in Architecture and Environmental Design. She completed BSc in Architecture and Environmental Design in 2011 and an MSc in Architecture and Environmental Design from the Arab Academy of Science and Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Ain-Shams University in 2020, through a partially funded interdisciplinary research project in collaboration between the American University in Cairo and Princeton University in the United States of America. Her thesis topic was ‘Programming the Motion of Building Façade Materials by Controlling their Latent Passive Response’.

She has been working on several interdisciplinary research projects in collaboration with different international universities such as Princeton University, Rome Tre University, and American University in Cairo. Her research mainly focuses on utilising programmable and smart materials in adaptive and responsive architecture design. During her PhD, she developed a novel programmable material that responds to variations in temperature and humidity with zero energy consumption.

Her work has been published in several high-ranked journals in addition to international prestigious conferences and books.