Mitra Azimi

I was born during the war between Iran and Iraq in 1986 in Iran. My father was a teacher, and my mom was a housewife. They always emphasized high education and financial dependency for women to empower women in a men dominant country like Iran. Therefore, I worked hard to get admission to the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents (NODET) at 12. I liked painting since my childhood, and I always participated in the painting competition while I was in high school. My artistic and mathematic passion pushed me to choose architecture as my future career. I got admission in architecture engineering at Shahid Beheshti University (former Melli University) in 2004. After graduation, I worked as a junior architect for three years before I start the M.Sc. program in landscape architecture at IKIU. I continued my work while studying in the master's program to save money for my future goals and one year after graduation, I applied for the M.Arch program in the US and moved to the United States. I am the first one and the ONLY one among my relatives who immigrated up to now. Immigration is an incredibly eye-opening experience. However, it is also a dramatic change in life and struggles would be suffering at first. I got an M.Arch degree in architecture at Texas A&M University in 2018. I recently defended my Ph.D. dissertation titled" Analysis of Climate Change Impacts on the Performance of Net-Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) at Texas A&M University.