Melodie Yashar

Melodie Yashar is the Director of Building Design & Performance at ICON, a construction technologies company focused on large scale additive manufacturing for Earth and in space. Melodie oversees the architectural direction of ICON’s built work as well as the performance of ICON’s building systems to deliver optimally-performing structures that shift the paradigm of homebuilding on Earth and beyond. Collaborating across technology and construction teams, her department supports design and construction of dignified and resilient terrestrial housing solutions in addition to supporting the development of ICON’s off-world construction systems.

Melodie teaches undergraduate and graduate design studios at Art Center College of Design. In previous roles Melodie was a Senior Research Associate with the Human Systems Integration Division at NASA Ames via San Jose State University Research Foundation (SJSURF), a co-founder of Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch+), a research group developing human-supporting designs for space exploration, as well as a Professor within the Architecture department of Pratt Institute.

Melodie obtained a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a Master of Human-Computer Interaction with an emphasis in Robotics from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. Melodie is of Iranian heritage and geeks out on new material & fabrication technologies. She likes tiny robots. She would like to visit the Moon (though not yet Mars) in her lifetime.