ABOUT

Manal Anis, LEED AP BD+C, is a PhD student in the Technology and Environment track at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her Master of Science in Architecture degree from The Pennsylvania State University and her Bachelor of Architecture degree from BUET, Bangladesh. She previously worked as a Designer at WRNS Studio, CA, where she worked on multiple core and shell projects from Design Development and Construction Document phase to LEED documentation.

Her master's work, "Designing an adaptive building envelope for warm-humid climate with bamboo veneer as a hygroscopically active material", focused on climate-adaptive building envelop systems that can be designed to respond to external environmental stimuli as organic, breathable skins. It was shortlisted for the Best Paper award at the ARCC conference of 2019. In Spring 2019, she received the ARCC King Medal for Excellence in Architectural and Environmental Research.

She is currently working on developing climate-adaptive building façades using shape-memory alloys to maximize daylight and ventilation. Her work bridges architecture, materiality, and computation, and has been awarded multiple fellowships such as the Robert F Mast Fellowship and the William Henry Meyer Scholarship. In Summer 2023, she joined Gensler Research Institute as a Student Fellow, where she worked on identifying the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) impacting the future of Professional Services design in a post-COVID world. Her collaborative prototype design for the ‘Law Office of the Future’ was shared with law firm clients to show where their projects could be heading in 50 to 100 years.