Mae-ling Lokko, assistant professor in the School of Architecture at Yale University, has received a 2026 Women in Architecture Design Leadership Award from Architectural Record magazine. Now in its thirteenth year, the award acknowledges and promotes the accomplishments of women architects.
An architectural scientist, designer, and educator from Ghana and the Philippines, Dr. Lokko focuses her work on the intersectoral design and research of bio-based materials to drive ecological health and generative justice goals. At Yale, she teaches courses on environmental design and the history and contemporary design of bio-based building technologies. Dr. Lokko also serves as assistant director of the Center for Ecosystems in Architecture, where she directs doctoral research on the whole life cycle development, distributed infrastructures design, and policy around non-toxic, low-carbon materials. Outside of her work at Yale, Dr. Lokko is the founder of Willow, a Ghana-based practice aimed at developing academic-community research partnerships to implement and scale demonstration architectural projects.
A graduate of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, Dr. Lokko holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in architectural science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.