Dr. Thelma Lazo-Flores has been a design educator in both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels of interior architecture, landscape architecture, furniture design, product and interface design, visual communications, industrial design, and studio art programs in the US, Singapore, Japan and the Philippines for nearly twenty years. Further, she has professionally practiced for ten years prior to joining the academia. She received her Ph.D. in Design Science and Planning from Chiba University, Japan with a scholarship grant from the Japanese Ministry of Education.
Dr. Lazo-Flores has been engaged in several leadership positions such as:
Chair/Director/Associate Professor of Interior and Landscape Architecture Programs at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;
Chair/Professor of Furniture Design at Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia;
Head of School for the School of Design at LaSalle College of the Arts in Singapore; and
Graduate Program Coordinator at the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines.
She also served in capstone examination committees for several design programs with the University of Central England’s Birmingham Institute of Art and Design, and Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology during her term in Singapore. Her broad spectrum of research includes refereed international presentations, various published book chapters in the US, UK, Finland, Italy, India, and Japan. Her peer-reviewed articles cover the areas of design for sustainability, pedagogical structures, spatial design studies, applied theory and practice, and socio-cultural issues affecting design.