Quick Take with Mahshid Jalalian

I was so honored to have received this award and be among 11 other Rising Stars this year who are doing amazing work and share the same passion. This was such a wonderful validation of the work we are doing in healthcare design and research.

This was the focus of my PhD thesis at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It explores the relationship between human experiences and the built environment at various scales—from individual buildings to urban spaces—aiming to understand how different design elements can affect how people think, feel, and work in those spaces.

My focus is really about people in any building types, whether that’s healthcare, higher education, or workplaces. Yet healthcare holds particular interest for me because I frequently visited my father in his medical office in Iran when I was young and saw first-hand hospital layout and the patient care process.

The industry has spearheaded evidence-based design research. But there are always gaps. We have designers who have innovative hypotheses as they conceptualize projects. What I do as a researcher is study those concepts, collect and analyze data, and verify hypotheses that support our work.

I developed both pre- and post-occupancy evaluations of St. Elizabeth Healthcare Cancer Center in Kentucky, working with our designers, medical planners, and the cancer center nurses and patients. We saw the benefits of our design decisions, what worked as planned and what we needed to tweak. This is all part of the continuous learning process that informs our future work and contributes to industry knowledge.

As researchers, we have multiple ways of sharing these results. The best projects are those in which we pair up with the medical planner and designers to review data and design ideas. That’s a dream team because we are directly applying research to practice.

It’s fascinating how much the function and flow of architecture influence behavior and emotion. Winston Churchill famously said, “We shape our buildings and afterward our buildings shape us.” And that’s so true. Different settings affect us, sometimes quite subtly, sometimes more overtly. What I’ve learned is that it depends on the unique character of the space and the individual.

I look forward to continuing my research, discovering new and exciting evidence, and translating that into meaningful designs. Ultimately this is toward one goal—improve human experiences.