First year DDes student Somayeh Chitchian has won the ESRI Development Center Student of the Year Award for her work “Middle Eastern Immigration Landscape in America.” Sponsored by the Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard’s ESRI Development Center, the award was created to recognize outstanding achievements in developing novel tools or techniques for geographic analysis. The award committee called the project “an original, exemplary example of how geographic techniques and visual analysis can depict a complex social and cultural phenomenon”.
Chitchian created her submission as part of her MDesS Critical Conservation thesis and the course Maps and Mapping in fall 2013. Focussing on the geography of immigration, Chitchian explores the socio-spatial restructurings of ethnic communities to develop new modes of inquiry appropriate to the contemporary challenges of urban diversity and governance.