Mahesh Senagala is the Irving Distinguished Professor and Chair of Department of Architecture at Ball State University where he is also the inaugural Emerging Media Fellow of the Institute for Media Design. Prior to joining his current position, he was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs & Research in the College of Architecture, University of Texas at San Antonio. His research interests include smart environments, tensile fabric systems, management, education, and sustainability. He has been elected 2007-8 President of ACADIA. He is the recipient of the President’s Award for Distinguished Achievement for Creative Production at UTSA in 2007. In addition to the Master of Architecture from Kansas State University, he holds the General Management Executive Certificate from UT Austin McComb’s School of Business. As a recipient of a joint fellowship from Harvard Business School and Kennedy School of Government, he has attended the Nonprofit Management executive education program (PMNO). He is a USGBC LEED Accredited Professional.

He is the author of over 65 scholarly and creative works, including 45 refereed works in the last eight years. He has won Best Publication and Best Presentation awards at various international conferences. He has delivered over two-dozen invited lectures and an equal number of paper presentations world-wide. He is the recipient of 22 teaching, research, and travel grants, donations, and sponsorships worth more than $1,392,000. He has raised funds worth $103,000 for UTSA within four months to build two full-scale, well-published tensile fabric structures, named UTenSAils. The project, designed and built by his design-build research studio at UTSA in collaboration with 24 international industry partners, has now been chosen as a Best Practice by American Institute of Architects.

Professor Senagala was a keynote speaker at the Association of Scientists of Indian Origin in America (ASIOA) conference in Denton, TX in 2007 and at the Sociedad Iberoamericana de Gráfica Digital (SIGRADI) international conference in Rosario, Argentina in 2003. He was a plenary panelist at ACADIA 2006 and SIGRADI 2005 conferences, a plenary speaker at the Fabric Structures 2005 conference and at a number of upcoming conferences. He has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, Industrial Fabrics Review, Fabric Architecture, and other publications in Asia and South America.

Prior to joining UTSA, he was a designer with the Kansas City firm Gould Evans Goodman Associates, where he played a key role in winning the 2001 AIA Kansas City Merit Award for the design of Baron BMW Auto Dealership. He has received the second prize in the U.S. Department of Energy Sun Wall national competition, Washington, D.C. held in 2000 from the then Energy Secretary Bill Richardson.