Maya Przybylski named O'Donovan Director of the School of Architecture
On June 12th, 2023, the Dean of Engineering, Mary Wells, announced the appointment of Maya Przybylski as O'Donovan Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo. Przybylski’s four-year term begins on September 2, 2022 following a year as Interim Director. The School of Architecture Nominating Committee unanimously recommended Pryzybylski following an intensive director search process, indicating excellent support from both faculty and staff.
Maya's priorities as incoming Director are: "building a thriving intellectual life that is mindful of balanced academic workloads, shared community values, and inclusive of varying perspectives. Waterloo Architecture will inspire the next generation of architects to bring empathy, compassion, and attentiveness into their practices. A new focus on design-education exchanges will further shape our robust curriculum, and a renewed focus on community partnerships will bring support and enhance resources across our Cambridge and Rome campuses."
Maya joined the School of Architecture 2011 and has since played important academic and administrative roles at the University. Most recently, she was the Associate Director Undergraduate Studies, where she proved herself a capable leader though her positive, fair-minded and considered approaches to problem solving and decision making. She has demonstrated a commitment to service that is characterized by action.
Maya has a long track record of teaching design-oriented classes and studios at the school, establishing a vibrant cluster of critically-informed, computationally-engaged learning experiences alongside her colleagues. Stemming from her own computer science background, Maya is always eager to support interdisciplinary approaches to emerging design challenges. In 2018, Maya received the UW Faculty of Engineering Teaching Excellence Award.
Maya Przybylski is a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto where she was awarded the Royal Architectural Institute Medal for her thesis work. She previously earned a degree with a specialization in Software Engineering at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Through her teaching, research and design work, Maya is exploring the complex intersection of architectural design, data and computation. She is developing methods for achieving a more complete engagement, including sociocultural agency as well as technical capacity, with the computational components embedded within data-driven design work.
In addition to continuing numerous important projects already underway at the school, in her role as director Maya is prioritizing the task of ensuring that the school properly reflects on, and builds on, the many pedagogical, cultural and operational insights that emerged during pandemic disruptions.
The School of Architecture congratulates Maya on her new role and looks forward to her leadership.