Azza Kamal is Instructional Assistant Professor of Geodesign, Sustainability, and Urban & Regional Planning. She is a board member and chair of awards and scholarships committee of Women in GIS organization. She specializes in advanced GIS applications in housing policy, eviction prevention, and sustainable and resilient communities. Her research on advanced image detection for climate change adaptation, mapping heritage sites, and housing policy and production is published in the Journal of Urban Planning and Development, International Journal of Architectural Research, Camino Real Journal, Computational Urban Planning and Urban Management (CUPUM) proceedings, and other international publications. She was named twice (in 2017 and 2022) to the prestigious Fulbright Specialist Roster, and her current project “a cross-cultural perspective on sustainable urban development and real estate finance” is a multi-tiered collaboration with Technical University-Berlin. She is also the recipient of the 2016 University of Texas at San Antonio Faculty Award for Service to Undergraduate Research and Creative Inquiry.
Dr. Kamal is an urban planner, research consultant, and a licensed architect in Egypt. She led the design development of “El Gouna – Phase V: sustainable master planned community” in the Eastern Province in Egypt. She also spearheaded the drafting and public campaign for the 2019 Emergency Assistance Ordinance in San Antonio, TX and developed the city’s first geospatial tool for funding allocation. With a team of graduate students at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she studied resilient planning to mitigate stormwater runoff, and advised on HUD’s Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) in Phoenix, AR and Denver, CO. Her technical policy report on sustainable workforce housing in six counties of the Eagle Ford Shale Region was cited by several media outlets.
She teaches intro and advanced GIS as well as sustainable and equitable development solutions through a global perspective and her current research focuses on paradigms of integrating sustainability and the UN SDGs in the undergraduate curricula.