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Dr. Taro Narahara:
Computational Designer, Architect, Researcher
Taro Narahara is an Associate Professor with tenure at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). He has lectured widely on data-driven architectural design, real-estate technologies, generative design inspired by self-organization, visualization of human behavior, robotic fabrication, and digital design education. He has published extensively in the fields of architecture and computational design, with works featured in IJAC, CAADRIA, eCAADe, Eurographics, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (TMM), and SIGGRAPH.
He holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design (2010), where he won the Peter Rice Prize, and an M.S. degree in Design and Computation from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also holds an M.Arch. from Washington University and a B.S. in Mathematics from Waseda University.
In recognition of his innovative floor plan analysis using machine learning, he was awarded the IDR Excellence Award by the National Institute of Informatics (NII) Japan in 2021 and the Human Communication Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers (IEICE) Japan in 2020.
Narahara led projects funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2022 as a Principal Investigator focusing on computational design research for multifamily residential architecture and, in 2016, collaborated as a Co-Principal Investigator with biomedical engineers on rehabilitation robotics and therapeutic gaming.
From 2018 to 2019, while on sabbatical leave from NJIT, he was a visiting scholar at the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, the University of Tokyo, and the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA), ETH Zurich.
At the Hillier College of Architecture and Design (HCAD) at NJIT, he has taught computational design courses and studios for both undergraduate and graduate students, including mentoring Ph.D. candidates in Urban Systems as a primary adviser and in Computer Science, Information Technology, and Biomedical Engineering as a co-adviser.