Before joining the UIC faculty, Dr Al-Kodmany worked on tall building projects as an architectural designer for the Chicago firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. He won several international architectural and urban design competitions. His current academic research focuses on sustainable urban design, vertical density, infrastructure, and geospatial visualization applications for planners. He has developed 3D modeling, virtual reality, GIS, and webbased mapping survey tools and software for effective participatory planning and design. He also served as the Co-Director of the Urban Data Visualization Laboratory at UIC and has engaged many communities in using GIS.