Fatemeh Saeidi-Rizi

Fatemeh Saeidi-Rizi received her BA in Architecture from the University of New Mexico and her MLA from Virginia Tech. Currently, she is a Ph.D. research/teaching assistant in the department of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  As a member of the Sustainability and Human Health lab, she directly collaborates with Professor William Sullivan at the University of Illinois and Professor Chun-Yen Chang at National Taiwan University.

In her Ph.D. research, Fatemeh examines the relationship between the built environment and people’s mental health. She is particularly interested in studying the role of landscape and urban design in recovery from mental fatigue. Recent research in landscape architecture determines that green landscape has the capacity to promote the cognitive functioning of the human brain and help people to recover from attentional fatigue. However, the mechanism behind this process is still unclear. Fatemeh’s research helps in uncovering the neurological mechanism involving in this process. In her research, she uses cutting-edge technology, including functional MRI (fMRI) imaging systems, statistical analysis, and custom-built software toolkits, including Matlab and Browndog.