Our Team
Our Team
OUR STORY
This course is the brainchild of Aida Khan, PhD, Amna Saeed-Kothe, PhD, and Sameeta Ahmed, M.Arch. The class came out of Dr. Khan and Dr. Saeed-Kothe’s conversations lamenting about how their children, four in total (aged 7 to 16 at the time we started), are taught very little at school in the United States about the achievements of Muslim cultures and Islamic civilization. Drs. Khan and Saeed-Kothe were aware of Ms. Ahmed’s wide knowledge of Islamic civilization, art, and architecture and approached her for advice about how to address this gap. Our general overview class was born from those discussions.
It was our good fortune that Ms. Ahmed, a visual artist and architect who has also been a university professor of architecture, agreed to develop the curriculum and teach the general overview course to children and teens in the Boston, Massachusetts community. Our work has been well received. The parents of our students have also shared that they too wish to learn this material. From this, the three of us understood there is a wider need for what we offer. So here we are.
Sameeta Ahmed - Founder, Director of Curriculum Design & Instruction
Sameeta Ahmed, M. Arch (Instructor), is an architect, artist, and educator. She obtained a B.A. with a Fine Arts major & liberal arts focus from Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, followed by a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to practicing as an architect and artist, early in her career she taught in Montessori summer programs, created art programs for high school students, and taught art at the high school level. More recently, she has been a university professor of architecture and developed courses such as “History of Civilizations” and “Muslim Art & Architecture,” both of which focused on contributions from the Muslim world in design, science, and philosophy. A practicing architect, Ms. Ahmed was nominated for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 2023-2025 cycle, for one of her heritage conservation projects in the Swat Valley of Pakistan. She also has had group and solo shows of her paintings in Pakistan and the US.
Aida Khan - Founder & Executive Director
Aida Khan, PhD is a child psychologist, parent, and Lecturer in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She did her internship and post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Khan has held faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine. She has over 25 years of experience working with young people and consulting to schools. She lives with her family in the Boston, Massachusetts area.
Amna Saeed-Kothe - Founder
Amna Saeed-Kothe, PhD is a biochemist trained at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. For many years, she worked as a staff scientist at biotechnology companies. She has loved her life in research, which took her from Boston to Antarctica to study ice fish and back to Boston to work on developing new medicines at pharmaceutical companies. Her research has been published in various scientific journals and she has several patents to her name. She lives with her husband and two teenagers in a suburb of Boston.
