2022 HENAAC Awards
Education: Ph.D., Construction Management, University of Florida; Master’s, Construction Engineering & Management, University of Florida; Master’s, Environmental Engineering, University of Florida; Master’s, Building Construction, University of Florida; Bachelor’s, Architectural Engineering & Design, University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore (Pakistan).
As an undergraduate engineering student in her native Pakistan, Dr. Adeeba Raheem could not possibly have known how big of an impact she would have halfway around the world in the far southwest corner of Texas. Growing up in a culturally conservative society that restricted the ambitions of young women, to parents with little more than a middle school education, her future as a world-class educator, researcher and academic were equally impossible to envision. But she credits her mother’s steadfast belief in her dreams for inspiring her to power through these daunting barriers, telling her often that, “your education will change the lives of many other girls.”
Dr. Raheem arrived at the University of Texas at El Paso in 2014 after accumulating 4 graduate degrees and quickly connected with the large Hispanic population, many of whom were just like her: first-generation college students navigating academic, cultural, and financial challenges. She quickly deduced that financial instability and the lack of learner autonomy was negatively impacting the academic resiliency of UTEP students, and immediately set out to address those issues.
Since 2014, Dr. Raheem has secured more than $3.5 million to support the research and professional development of her students. She created a program to provide real world experience in construction engineering and improve communities in the El Paso area in the process – and then convinced the U.S. Department of Labor to fund it for 7 years and counting. Dr. Raheem is also a pioneer of online graduate instruction, she recently received a grant of $1 million to increase the graduate degree completion percentage of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates.
Her influence extends beyond UTEP’s campus as well. Dr. Raheem has mentored many high school students, most notably through an NSF-funded mentoring program for 20+ students in 2017 that enabled all of them to successfully transition to 4-year higher education institutes, mostly in STEM fields.