The School of Architecture and Planning is proud to announce that two of its faculty members are among the eight UB professors awarded the prestigious title of SUNY Distinguished Professor this year – Samina Raja, professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning, and Despina Stratigakos, professor in the Department of Architecture.

The SUNY Distinguished Professorship is bestowed upon faculty having achieved national or international prominence and a distinguished reputation within the individual’s chosen field through significant contributions to research and scholarship.

Samina Raja is a professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning as well as Director of the Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (the “Food Lab”), which focuses on understanding the role of planning and policy in building sustainable food systems and healthy communities.

In addition to being a leading scholar in her field and active leader in shaping food systems policies for healthier communities in Western New York, Raja is also an invaluable mentor for students. As director of UB’s Master of Urban Planning Community Health and Food Systems specialization, Raja engages her students in the classroom and through graduate studio courses that have worked to develop food systems plans alongside community partners in Buffalo and Trivandrum, India.

Raja works with a team of faculty, postdocs, doctoral fellows, and graduate and undergraduate students — as well as many community collaborators, including the Massachusetts Avenue Project, Buffalo Food Equity Network and Juneteenth Agricultural Pavilion — to strengthen food systems policy and planning, and promote healthy eating and active living.

Her work has received multiple awards, among them, the UB Exceptional Scholars: Sustained Achievement Award, the Champion of Community Change Award, and the 40 Under 40 Award from Buffalo Business First.

Raja’s teaching complements her scholarly research, training students of all academic ranks — and across many disciplines — and preparing dozens of award-winning trainees to become Fulbright scholars, Truman fellows, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Culture of Health fellows, and AAU Women fellows.

In partnership with collaborators nationwide, Raja is a founding member of Growing Food Connections, an initiative funded by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture to build capacity of local governments to strengthen food systems.  Her additional research interests include the role of planning in communities experiencing conflict (particularly in the Kashmir region of South Asia) and the fiscal dimensions of urban and regional planning.

Raja received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research has been published in leading planning and health journals, and she was the lead author of the Planners Guide to Community and Regional Food Planning: Transforming Food Environments, Building Healthy Communities, one of the earliest guidance monographs on food-systems planning published by the American Planning Association. 

Despina Stratigakos is a professor in the Department of Architecture. She’s a writer, historian, and educator, whose research explores how power and ideology function in architecture, whether in the creation of domestic spaces or world empires.

“I am drawn to those unexpected stories about architecture that flip our ideas of margin and center. At UB, I have been encouraged in this work by colleagues and students who share my curiosity about where this remapping leads us.”

Stratigakos has served as UB Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence and on the Board of Directors of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Martin House, Society of Architectural Historians, International Archive of Women in Architecture, and Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation.

She also participated on Buffalo’s municipal task force for Diversity in Architecture and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy and academic excellence. She is the author of four books: 

Hitler’s Northern Utopia: Building the New Order in Occupied Norway (2020), winner of the Society of Architectural Historians 2022 Spiro Kostof Book Prize, examines how Nazi architects and planners envisioned and began to construct a model “Aryan” society in Norway during World War II. 

Where Are the Women Architects? (2016) confronts the challenges that women face in the architectural profession.

Hitler at Home (2015) investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. 

She received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining UB. Her research has been supported by notable funding agencies in her field, including four Graham Foundation grants, and she has held research fellowships nationally and internationally at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, University of Michigan, University of Copenhagen, and Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, among others. She also served as co-PI for two landmark Mellon Foundation grants awarded to UB in 2019 and 2021.

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In addition to Raja and Stratigakos, the following UB faculty members have been elevated to the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor in 2025: Irus Braverman, professor in the School of Law; Michael E. Cain; professor in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; Jian Feng, professor in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; Siwei Lyu, professor in the School of Engineer and Applied Sciences; Jennifer Read, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology; and Nallan Suresh, professor in the School of Management.

All eight professors will be publicly honored at UB’s Celebration of Academic Excellence in the fall.