Omar Khan reappointed Head of School; Jeremy Ficca appointed Associate Head for Design Fundamentals

We are pleased to share exciting leadership updates from Carnegie Mellon Architecture (CM-A).

Omar Khan has been reappointed to a second five-year term as Head of School, effective July 1, 2025. Mary Ellen Poole, Dean of the College of Fine Arts, with the support of Provost Jim Garrett, announced Khan’s reappointment following a five-month long review process. The Reappointment Committee, headed by Joshua D. Bard (Associate Head for Design Research at CM-A) and Charlie White (Head of the School of Art), reviewed Khan’s accomplishments over the past five years and evaluated feedback from faculty, staff, students and external stakeholders in the forms of surveys, interviews and letters of support. The full committee included faculty and staff: Sarosh Anklesaria, Erica Cochran Hameen, Doug Cooper, Jon Holmes, Meredith Marsh, Azadeh O. Sawyer and Francesca Torello. 

“I am honored and humbled to be reappointed as the Head of the School of Architecture. As I look to the next five years, we are confronted with a variety of challenges that may be more daunting than the pandemic under which I started my headship. The intellectual safety that American academia has enjoyed and made a model for liberal education around the world is under threat. The response that I can offer is to hold on to the optimism we found in Pedagogies 2020 — a purpose and direction to be a “school of many”. To not sacrifice diversity as a critical part of education, nor look to utopias or grand theories for direction. Instead, I see promise in the global relationships that we have made that embrace our differences and will help us address the problems sure to come our way.”

Brought on as an agent of change, Khan was the first external Head of School appointed to CM-A in more than a decade. He began his headship during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and quickly brought faculty together to develop Pedagogies 2020 as a new framework for the School’s mission, curriculum, professional practice, hiring and every other aspect of the School’s identity. He simultaneously led a structural reorganization that spread responsibility among associate heads and ensured that a greater variety of voices could be heard. In collaboration with faculty and staff, he has begun to address issues of equitable access to materials and other professional opportunities for students. He has spurred the creation of a five-year hiring plan to address needs in targeted areas and in support of Pedagogies 2020. Finally, Khan has put significant time, energy and miles into engagement with alumni, donors and professional partners and has elevated the School’s profile as a result.

In an email to the CM-A community to announce Khan’s reappointment, Dean Poole wrote, “My decision was ultimately based not only on Omar’s accomplishments in the past five years, but on the conviction that this important project you and he have started is not yet finished, and that it can best be advanced under his continued leadership.”

Before joining CM-A, Khan served as department chair at the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo (UB), State University of New York. He received his bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell University and a master in design and computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab.

In addition to Khan’s reappointment, Associate Professor Jeremy Ficca has been appointed as Associate Head for Design Fundamentals. Ficca will be the second person in this role, following the retirement of Mary-Lou Arscott. One of the three tenets of CM-A’s Pedagogies, the Design Fundamentals pedagogy articulates an expansive approach to teaching core architectural competencies. It builds on learning through drawing and making (hand and digital), supported by computational, building science and ecological thinking. It embraces Indigenous and global historical models that demonstrate care and responsibility for the environment.

In this new role, Ficca will be responsible for overseeing the B.Arch and B.A. curricula, studio sequences and options, course requirements and electives, space planning, undergraduate NAAB accreditation, coordinating undergraduate admissions, student advising and discourse among undergraduate student representatives and the faculty and staff.

“I am honored to embark upon this next chapter and look forward to working with my colleagues and engaging with students in this new capacity. My interactions with our community remind me of the inherent optimism and imaginative potential of the design process and the critical role design fundamentals play in empowering our students and fostering a vibrant design culture. I am enthusiastic to join the leadership team and contribute to the collective effort of shepherding this wonderful school.”

Ficca is a licensed architect in Pennsylvania, an Associate Professor at CM-A, Track Chair for the Master of Advanced Architectural Design (MAAD) program, and Director of the Design Fabrication (dFAB) Lab. In addition to his appointment at CM-A, this semester, Jeremy has served as a Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where his research and teaching have been featured in a GSD news story. With his students, Jeremy seeks to co-create a learning culture that foregrounds the ethical dimensions of design and articulates the values that inform our common purpose. Jeremy earned his post-professional Master of Architecture from the GSD, with commendation, and his Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech.