Professor Mehdi S. Sabet attained his Bachelor of Fine Arts and Environmental Design from Parsons School of Design and the New School for Social Research, New York in 1976; and his Master's Degree in Architecture from Virginia Polytechnic Institute, Va. in 1978.
Professor Sabet is a member of the NCARB and AIA, and a licensed and a registered architect in the State of New York. Having over 20 years of architectural practice experience in the United States and the Middle East, he has worked in the offices of Marcel Breuer Associates, Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, and the Phillips Group in New York City. He has also collaborated, as a senior associate manager with Muse Architects and Planners in New York City from1985-92.
Throughout his career, Professor Sabet, in-parallel with his professional practice, has maintained his academic association with numerous universities in the USA and Lebanon. After three years of practicing architecture and interior design in the United Arab Emirates, in 1998 he joined the American University of Sharjah, School of Architecture & Design as a full-time associate professor. Recently, he has taken a semester off from academia to work with Nakheel/Palm Deira as a senior design manager to work on various planning and architectural projects and was actively involved in the evaluation process of international competitions for many high profile projects that are destined to be part of Nakheel’s Palm Deira development.
As a past member of the Board of Directors of the Afghan SAE (Society of Architects & Engineers/USA), Professor Sabet has been keenly involved in the re-construction process, especially in the education sector, in his native country Afghanistan. He chaired an emergency session of post conflict of urban conference in Kabul in 2002. From the education perspective, he continues to engage his students in socially focused architecture projects.