Outstanding Faculty Award
Pardis Pishdad-Bozorgi
Associate Professor
School of Building Construction
Pardis continuously makes outstanding contributions to the School, College, and the Institute, and brings great visibility to our community through her national leadership roles in prominent Professional Associations. She teaches both undergraduate and graduate-level courses on Building Information Modeling (BIM), Integrated Design, Construction and Development Processes, and Capstone. Her research focuses on Technology and Innovative Project Delivery Methods that enhance life cycle integration of data, stakeholders, and workflow processes with the aim of increasing productivity and reducing waste.
Pardis is also exceeding expectations in service. Over the past year, she has served as the Graduate Program Director, Co-Chaired the Curriculum Committee, and is participating in the planning of our inaugural pre-college program. Her leadership resulted in a degree modification proposal for our MS BCFM degree, which has been successfully approved by School and College committees. At the college level, she served in the Search Committee for SBC School Chair, COD Curriculum Committee, and Research & Scholarship Committee.
At the Institute level, she served as a fellow member of Commission on Research Next and Provost’s Teaching Learning Fellow. Pardis Pishdad-Bozorgi is an outstanding and dedicated educator, scholar, advisor, and an emerging leader. Her drive for excellence and passion for growth and service is inspiring and worthy of recognition.
Outstanding Research and Scholarship Award
Clio Andris
Associate Professor
School of City and Regional Planning
Clio has distinguished herself as an excellent scholar, teacher, and colleague. She has a growing reputation in the fields of urban analytics, spatial social networks, geovisualization and human computer interactions. Clio conducts research on urban analytics with a focus on the development of new analytical and visualization tools to explore social, political, and cultural relationships across geographic space.
Her approach to research, working very closely with her lab and her advisees, additionally facilitate the training of students in advanced techniques. She has been exceptionally successful in receiving grants to support her research as well as her students. Most notably, she received an NSF CAREER Award in 2021. NSF CAREER Award is one of the most prestigious awards that NSF grants. Being a CAREER recipient is particularly rare among City and Regional Planning faculty.
She has published 26 peer-reviewed journals articles, with an average of 3-5 articles per year over the last few years. Her extraordinary success in securing research grants has created research opportunities for our students. She has a large research group (eight advisees) and is very active in mentoring students. She is advising three doctoral students, which is applaudable given her stage in her career.
Outstanding Research Faculty Award
Arthi Rao
Research Scientist II
Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development (CQGRD)
Arthi has been a Research Scientist at CQGRD since 2018 and has had a consistent focus on healthy communities’ research throughout her career supported by her interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geospatial Analytics.
For the past four years, she has led and participated in the development of multiple grant proposals to federal (NIH, NSF, ACF) and state agencies— a total of 39 full proposals and letters of intent combined. More recently, she has led and managed research teams to execute sponsor-funded research as a Principal Investigator (PI) in the areas of smart communities and social equity, healthy transportation planning, and healthcare systems and community benefit spending.
Since 2019, she has served as a PI on multiple Georgia Smart Community Challenge grants where she has worked with local Georgia communities including Macon-Bibb and Clayton counties. In 2021, she independently developed and contributed to a total of 9 proposals and acquired $209,055 (plus $320,000 over the next 4 years) in new research funding as PI/Co-PI and was able to support two graduate research assistants. In 2021, she was invited to serve as a co-principal investigator (Ga Tech PI) for the National African American Child and Family Research Center (NAACFRC) in partnership with the Morehouse School of Medicine. The NAACFRC is funded through a $1.8 million per year, five-year grant from the Administration for Children and Families, a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Outstanding Staff Award
Sei Yoshioko-Cefalo
Academic Program Manager
School of City and Regional Planning
Sei is the Academic Program Manager in the School of City and Regional Planning. His passion for his job and dedication to the School and CoD are unparalleled. He has been providing excellent administrative support to SCaRP. He is focused and honest. He is very knowledgeable about the Institute rules and follows them diligently.
Sei always finds ways to help our faculty and students. He did not hesitate to take on additional responsibilities to sustain the School’s operations when two staff members were lost. He was eager to learn curriculum requirements and course schedules to answer student/faculty inquiries. He liaised with the Registrar’s office on student/faculty inquiries. He took the initiative and learned Slate (application system used by the Office of Graduate Studies and graduate programs at Georgia Tech), to make sure our graduate admissions processes moved smoothly.
Sei goes above and beyond to make sure our faculty and students are taken care of. He is resourceful, takes initiative and is outcome oriented. He consistently follows-through to ensure all loose ends are completed. He makes sure tasks are delivered before deadlines. He is honest and a pleasure to work with.