Zahra Ghazanfari, a student in Clemson University’s Design and the Built Environment Ph.D. program, has earned two prestigious fellowships for her research to support children’s mental health.
The Center for Health Design has named Ghazanfari a 2025 Joseph G. Sprague Foundation New Investigator Award recipient, and the Foundation for Health Environments Research has selected her as the 2025–26 Griffin/McKahan/Zilm (GMZ) Graduate Fellow in Health Facility Planning & Design.
Specifically, she says her research focuses on outdoor spaces designed to support therapeutic care models in pediatric behavioral and mental health facilities.
“I feel deeply grateful for the trust and recognition,” Ghazanfari said. “These awards highlight the importance and timeliness of this research topic for the next generation, and they motivate me to ensure meaningful and impactful outcomes from my study.”
At Clemson, Ghazanfari is performing research in the newly-established Health Equity + Environmental Design (HE+ED) Lab under the direction of Assistant Professor Lyndsey Deaton.
“Zahra’s project grows out of our HE+ED Lab’s emphasis on turning research into design action for vulnerable populations across the Southeast and beyond,” Deaton said. “Her study links specific landscape qualities—sensory cues, shade and refuge, movement affordances, staff sightlines—to clinical aims such as regulation, de-escalation, and family co-participation.”
Ghazanfari’s dissertation proposal is built on a sustained, child-centered portfolio from the HE+ED Lab. That work ranges from a post-occupancy evaluation toolkit for pediatric behavioral health milieu to community research on children’s active mobility with A.J. Wittenberg Elementary, recently published in Cities & Health.
According to the Center for Health Design, the Joseph G. Sprague Foundation New Investigator Award exists to “support and recognize high-quality research by new investigators around the world in the field of evidence-based healthcare facility design.”
Ghazanfari is the second student in the Richard A. McMahan School of Architecture’s doctoral program to be named a Griffin/McKahan/Zilm Graduate Fellow in recent years; Swati Goel earned the honor in 2023-2024. The fellowship encourages research related to the programming and planning of healthcare facilities and advances the knowledge of planning and design for healthcare environments.
