LCAU - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab
Abdul Latif Jameel Professor; Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab
Job Titles:
- External Relations Manager
For over 20 years, Addy Smith-Reiman has successfully engaged people with projects that celebrate local identity, shared histories and future use. She integrates research, design, civic engagement and long-term stewardship planning for successful projects that activate place: from forming a non-profit to transform an abandoned 1860's opera house into a vibrant cultural center in northern Vermont; managing the planning of Connect Historic Boston, including securing a TIGER V discretionary grant to link transit hubs to historic sites with improved pedestrian and bicycling corridors throughout downtown Boston; or managing complex trail, infrastructure and public art projects connecting neighborhoods to the parks and open spaces along the three rivers in Pittsburgh, PA.
Until recently, she was the Executive Director of the Portland Society for Architecture (PSA), a small non-profit in Portland, Maine, whose mission is to encourage innovation and vision in the built environment through education, advocacy and engagement. Over her seven years as ED, she produced design competitions, exhibitions, public lectures and charrettes, and construction tours and socials for design professionals and the civically curious, she also helped develop Building Bird-Safe policy for both the State of Maine and the City of Portland. She holds Masters degrees in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and an undergraduate degree (with a concentration in Studio Art) from Sarah Lawrence College.
She lives in Portland, ME with her husband, Josh, a faculty member and Chair of Sculpture at the Maine College of Art & Design, their son, Ole, and their dog, Otto.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Architecture, Planning, and Urban Design
Adèle Naudé Santos, FAIA, is a Professor and served as the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning from 2004 to 2015. Prior to that she was professor at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design where her academic focus was the design of housing environments.
Professor Santos has an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association in London. She also received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard University as well as a Master of Architecture and a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania.
Her academic career includes professorships at University of California Berkeley, Harvard University, Rice University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she also served as Chair of the Department of Architecture. She was the founding Dean of the new School of Architecture at UC San Diego and has had numerous visiting appointments around the world, including Italy and in her native South Africa.
In addition to her academic work, she is principal architect in the San Francisco-based firm, Santos Prescott and Associates. Her architectural and planning projects include affordable and luxury housing and institutional buildings in Africa: South Africa, Swaziland, and Botswana; affordable housing in California and Japan; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia; the Center for the Arts at Albright College, Reading, PA; the Yerba Buena Gardens Children's Center in San Francisco; City Links, A Vision Plan for San Diego. She is currently working in Guatemala on a children's center, and has several projects under construction in China.
Job Titles:
- Aga Khan Assistant Professor
- Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
Job Titles:
- Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design Director, P - REX
Alan M. Berger is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he teaches courses open to the entire student body. He is founding director of MIT's P-REX lab, a research lab focused on environmental problems caused by urbanization, including the design, remediation, and reuse of waste landscapes worldwide. All of his research, teaching, and practice emphasize the links between urbanization and the loss of natural resources and growth of waste, to help us better understand how to proceed with redesigning intelligent outcomes. Alan's research spans a wide interdisciplinary range, including: sustainable cities and suburban forms, urban planning for autonomous mobility, resilient urbanism, growth boundary landscapes, reclamation of ecological systems, and stormwater wetland design. Unlike conventional practice, there are no scalar limits in his outlook or pedagogy: Projects are defined by the extent of the urban and environmental problems being addressed. He coined the term "Systemic Design" to describe the reintegration of disvalued landscapes into our urbanized territories and regional ecologies.
His most recent book is entitled A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy (co-authors Carolyn Kousky, William Fleming), published in early 2021 by Island Press. Berger's award-winning anthology Infinite Suburbia (with Joel Kotkin, Celina Balderas Guzman) presents the global suburban expansion through the research of its 74 authors, and the coeditors' own perspectives and work. Previous award-winning books include Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America, and Reclaiming the American West, his other books include Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, The Infrastructural Monument and Scaling Infrastructure (with Alexander D'Hooghe), Nansha Coastal City: Landscape and Urbanism in the Pearl River Delta (with Margaret Crawford), Systemic Design Can Change the World, and Landscape + Urbanism Around the Bay of Mumbai (with Rahul Mehrotra), and LCAU's 2013 Report on the State of Health + Urbanism (with Andrew Scott).
He was Director of the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU) from 2015-2020, and LCAU Research Director from 2010-2015. Prior to MIT Berger was Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard-GSD, 2002-2008. He is a Prince Charitable Trusts Fellow of The American Academy in Rome. He is a Visiting Honorary Professor at Oslo School of Architecture (AHO).
Architect, urban designer and researcher. He holds an architecture degree from Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey in Mexico and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies in Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an Urban Design Certificate. His recent research resides in the intersection of alternative land tenure systems, ecological processes and rurban form. He has worked on a wide range of design scales in projects in Mexico, United States, Venezuela, Australia, China and India. Alberto has received the Julian Beinart Research Award, the MIT DesignX Post-Pandemic World Challenge Grant, the Jose Miguel Bejos Fellowship, the Harold Horowitz Research Fund and the Felix Candela Prize, among others. His work has been exhibited in several national and international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale, in 2016; the ETSAM in Madrid; the UNAM in Mexico, in 2019 and in Chengdu, China in 2020.
Alessandra is a PhD Candidate at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and a Fellow of the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Her research focuses on environmental policy and planning for the conservation of transboundary ecosystems. Specifically, she studies transnational cooperation and sovereignty at the local and national levels with evidence from the Amazon Biogeographical Region.
She is engaged in projects concerning socio-environmental well-being in the Amazon, including initiatives on integrated territorial planning in border areas and on equitable growth in urban centres, with an express commitment to preserving the ecological integrity of the region.
Previously, Alessandra was a Tenured Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. She has also worked in Genova, Milan, Paris, London, and Sydney. Her educational background includes a Master of Architecture cum Laude in Urban Design at the University of Ferrara, Italy, an exchange program at the Universidad Catolica de Cordoba, Argentina, and a Master in Emerging Technologies and Design cum Distinction at the Architectural Association of London, UK.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning
Andres Sevtsuk is a Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he also leads the City Form Lab. His work bridges city design, active mobility and spatial analytics. Andres is the author of the Urban Network Analysis toolbox, used by researchers and practitioners around the world to model pedestrian flows along city streets and to study coordinated land use and transportation development along networks. He has recently published a book entitled "Street Commerce: Creating Vibrant Urban Sidewalks" with Penn Press and "Urban Network Analysis: Tools for Modeling Walking and Biking in Cities" with Tianjin University Press. Andres has collaborated with a number of city governments, international organizations, planning practices and developers on urban designs, plans and policies in both developed and rapidly developing urban environments, most recently including those in US, Indonesia, Estonia and Singapore. He has led various international research projects, published in planning, transportation and urban design journals, and received numerous awards for his work. Before joining MIT, Andres was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an SMArchs in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Architecture Urbanism
Andrew Scott is a Professor of Architecture and Urbanism in the Department of Architecture. He is a UK registered architect with extensive professional and academic experience in the UK and the US. He has served as interim department head from 2018-20, as associate head 2016-18, and earlier as the director of the Master of Architecture program and of the Architectural and Urbanism discipline group. He has served on several institute committees, including the Institute Planning Committee. In 2015 he also was commissioned to develop the West Campus framework study for the future development of the western sector of the MIT campus.
Andrew Scott's professional, design and research interest revolve around explorations of ecological issues, in particular the criticality of climate change in relation to various forms and scales of architecture, cities and urban systems. His recent projects, studio teaching and publications have focused on low-carbon communities, health and design at multiple scales, and the new models for affordable urban housing.
He has completed many graduate design studios, design research studies, and projects that explore these issues in different countries, geographical contexts, and scale of impact and operation. These include Barcelona and the Galapagos Islands. He has worked and consulted extensively with industrial partners in China, Japan and in the UK- and organized the MIT international symposiums ‘Dimensions of Sustainability' and ‘Mass Impact: Cities and Climate Change'. His most recent book, published in 2012 is 'Renewtown: Adaptive Urbanism and the Low Carbon Community' (Routledge).
Andrew Scott has held teaching appointments in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada - and has been an External Examiner to the architecture program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received both his undergraduate degree and his professional degree in Architecture from the University of Manchester in the UK. Prior to his appointment to MIT, his professional career in the UK included 15 years in practice with Foster Associates (Foster and Partners), Aldington + Craig, and as a principal partner of Denton Scott Associates, Architects.
Andrew Scott's recent design and research work at MIT includes :
Job Titles:
- Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning
Anne Whiston Spirn is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT. The American Planning Association named her first book, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (1984), as one of the 100 most important books of the 20th century and credited it with launching the ecological urbanism movement.
Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project (WPLP), an action research project whose mission is to restore nature and rebuild community through strategic design, planning, and education programs. Through experimental projects, WPLP seeks to demonstrate how to create human settlements that are healthier, economical to build and maintain, more resilient, more beautiful, and more just. A key proposal of the West Philadelphia Landscape Project is to manage the West Philadelphia's Mill Creek watershed as part of a broad approach to improving regional water quality and as a strategy to secure funds to rebuild neighborhoods. In 1999, a White House summit for leading "Scholars and Artists in Public life" cited WPLP as a "Model of Best Practice." For more on WPLP, see www.wplp.net and www.wplp.net/timeline.
WPLP employs landscape literacy as a cornerstone of community development and served as a laboratory for Spirn's second book, The Language of Landscape (1998). The book sets out a theory of landscape and aesthetics that takes account of both human interpretive frameworks and natural process. It argues that landscape is a form of language with its own grammar and metaphors, and that we endanger ourselves by failing to learn and use this language.
In recent books, Spirn has continued to develop the concept of landscape literacy as part of the larger subject of visual literacy and visual thinking. Her award-winning book, Daring to Look (2008), presents photographs and reports from the field by the great photographer Dorothea Lange in 1939 and reflects on how the dynamics she saw and recorded in the Great Depression are still shaping American lives and landscapes. Spirn's most recent book, The Eye Is a Door: Landscape, Photography, and the Art of Discovery (2014), is about seeing as a way of knowing and photography as a way of thinking.
Since the mid 1990s, Spirn has explored the role of the World Wide Web as a platform for teaching and as a forum for experimentation and expression. She continues to explore the role of photography, multimedia, and the Web in qualitative research.
Prior to MIT, Anne Whiston Spirn taught at Harvard University, where she was director of the Landscape Architecture Program, and at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning and Director of the Urban Studies Program.
In 2018 Spirn received the National Design Award and the Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Medal. In 2001, she was awarded Japan's International Cosmos Prize for "contributions to the harmonious coexistence of nature and mankind." Her homepage is a gateway to her work and activities: www.annewhistonspirn.com
Antón García-Abril, (Madrid, 1969) is European PhD Architect by the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM-UPM), Registered Architect in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2012. He received the Spanish Academy Research Prize in Rome in 1996, and in 2000 established Ensamble Studio, a cross-functional team that he leads with his partner Débora Mesa. Balancing imagination and reality, art and science, their work innovates typologies, technologies and methodologies to address issues as diverse as the construction of the landscape or the prefabrication of the house. From their early works -SGAE Headquarters, Hemeroscopium House or The Truffle in Spain- to their most recent -Ensamble Fabrica in Madrid and Ca'n Terra in Menorca, Spain-, every project makes space for experimentation aiming to advance their field. Their work is extensively published in both printed and digital media, exhibited world-wide -2019 Cooper Hewitt NYC Design Triennial, Chicago Architecture Biennial 2017, Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 and 2010, MOMA NY 2015, etc.- and awarded with international prizes -2022 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture, 2021 Marcus Prize, 2019 RIBA Charles Jencks Award, 2017 Architizer A+Award, 2016 NCSEA Excellence in Structural Engineering Awards, among others. Beside his professional career, Antón keeps a very active research and academic agenda: has been invited professor and lecturer at numerous universities and architecture forums and founded with Débora the POPlab (Prototypes of Prefabrication Research Laboratory) at MIT.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Artist
Azra Akšamija is a Sarajevo born artist and architectural historian. Akšamija graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University Graz, Austria in 2001, and received her M.Arch. from Princeton University, USA in 2004, and Ph.D. from MIT (HTC / AKPIA) in 2011. In her multi-disciplinary practice, she investigates the potency of art and architecture to facilitate the process of transformative mediation in cultural or political conflicts, and in so doing, provide a framework for researching, analyzing, and intervening in contested socio-political realities. Her recent work focuses on representation of Islamic identities in the West, spatial mediation of identity politics, and cultural pedagogy through art and architecture.
Akšamija's academic research highlights the significance of ethnic symbols, long-term cultural factors, and global cultural flows in the creation of contemporary nations. In her Ph.D. dissertation, Akšamija examined how Bosnian Muslims construct their identity through the lens of rebuilt or newly built mosques following the systematic destruction of religious architecture during the 1992-1995 Bosnian War. Her academic inquiry informs her ongoing artistic explorations about Islam in the West and the conflicts over visibility of Muslims in the United States and Europe. Akšamija's artistic work takes shape through different types of media, including clothing, video, performance, sculpture, and new media. Among her preceding curatorial projects was the Lost Highway Expedition (2006) that Akšamija co-organized with nine international artists and architects during her tenure as a Graduate Affiliate at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, as well as the Museum Solidarity project that she conceived and co-organized with members of the civic platform Cultureshutdown.net.
Her work has been widely published and exhibited in leading international venues and was awarded the Honorable Mention at the Sixth Graz Biennial on Media and Architecture in 2003. Prominent institutions and festivals that exhibited her work include the Generali Foundation Vienna (2002), the Valencia Biennial (2003), Gallery for Contemporary Art Leipzig (2003), the Liverpool Biennial (2004), the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2005), the Sculpture Center New York (2006), the Secession Vienna (2007), Manifesta 7 (2008), the Stroom The Hague (2009), the Royal Academy of Arts London (2010), the Jewish Museum Berlin (2011), and the Fondazione Giorgio Cini as a part of the 54th Art Biennale in Venice. Recent exhibitions include Queens Museum of Art, New York (2013), ifa Gallery in Stuttgart and Berlin (2012), and curatorial projects such as the exhibition Interior View South-East at the Vorarlberg Architecture Institute in Dornbirn, Austria
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy
- Head of the City Design
Brent D. Ryan is Head of the City Design and Development Group and Associate Professor of Urban Design and Public Policy in MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His research focuses on the aesthetics and policies of contemporary urban design, particularly with respect to current and pressing issues like deindustrialization and climate change. Professor Ryan's first book Design After Decline: How America rebuilds shrinking cities, was selected by Planetizen as one of its ten best urban planning books of 2012, and his second book, The Largest Art, was published by MIT Press in 2017.
Professor Ryan's research has been published in the Journal of Urban Design, Journal of Urbanism, Journal of Planning History, Urban Design International, Urban Morphology, and the Journal of the American Planning Association, which awarded his article "Reading Through A Plan" its best article of 2011. Professor Ryan has also written numerous chapters for books including The Routledge Companion to Urban Design, Second Edition; The City After Abandonment; Urban Landscape; The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning; Rethinking Global Urbanism; and Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View.
Professor Ryan is currently conducting research in China, examining the urban design dimensions of emerging shrinking cities, and the urban design futures of new town expansion projects. Professor Ryan is also working in Ukraine with the architectural, arts, and planning collective Urban Curators on a study of post-industrial Kyiv, and is in Year Three of a study of sustainability in Siberian cities, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. He is also initiating a study of post-industrial space along the Hooghly river in Kolkata, India, in collaboration with IIT Kharagpur.
Prior to joining MIT, Professor Ryan taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also Co-Director of the City Design Center. Professor Ryan holds a B.S. in biology from Yale University (1991), a M. Arch. from Columbia University (1994), and a Ph.D. in urban design and planning from MIT (2002).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Urban Science
- Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning
Catherine D'Ignazio is an Assistant Professor of Urban Science and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. She is also Director of the Data + Feminism Lab which uses data and computational methods to work towards gender and racial equity, particularly as they relate to space and place. D'Ignazio is a scholar, artist/designer and hacker mama who focuses on feminist technology, data literacy and civic engagement. She has run reproductive justice hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea level rise.With Rahul Bhargava, she built the platform Databasic.io, a suite of tools and activities to introduce newcomers to data science. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in the Journal of Peer Production, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of Human Factors in Computing Systems (ACM SIGCHI). Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org and the Knight Foundation and exhibited at the Venice Biennial and the ICA Boston.
Prior to joining DUSP, D'Ignazio was an Assistant Professor of Data Visualization and Civic Media at Emerson College in the Journalism Department, taught for seven years in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design and did freelance software development for more than ten years. She holds an MS from the MIT Media Lab, an MFA from Maine College of Art, and a BA in International Relations (Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Tufts University. D'Ignazio speaks English, Spanish and French and has lived in Buenos Aires, Paris and Catalunya. She is a co-founder of the globally unknown spatial justice collective the Institute for Infinitely Small Things and an organizer with the Public Laboratory for Open Technology & Science. D'Ignazio is a proud board member of Indigenous Women Rising, an organization working to advance Native & Indigenous People's inherent right to equitable and culturally safe health options.
Job Titles:
- Building Scientist
- Professor Director, Building Technology Program
Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. He is also the head of Solemma, a technology company and Harvard University spinoff as well as Strategic Development Advisor for mapdwell, a solar mapping company and MIT spinoff. Products originating from SDL and Solemma are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.
Before joining MIT in 2012, Christoph led the sustainable design concentration area at Harvard's Graduate School of Design where the student forum voted him the 2009 Teacher of the Year for the Department of Architecture. From 1997 to 2008 Christoph had worked as a staff scientist at the National Research Council of Canada and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany. He has authored over 150 peer-reviewed scientific articles including two textbooks on daylighting and seven book chapters. His work has been supported by a variety of organizations from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy and the Governments of Canada, Kuwait and Portugal to Autodesk, Exelon, Kalwall, Philips, Saint Gobain, Shell and United Technology Corporation.
Christoph's work has been recognized with various awards among them a Fraunhofer Bessel Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2018), the IBPSA-USA Distinguished Achievement Award (2016), a Star of Building in Science award by Buildings4Change magazine (2013) and seven best paper awards. Mapdwell has been recognized with FastCompany's Design by Innovation 2015 award for Data Visualization as well as a Sustainia 100 award. Christoph is a physicist by training and holds a doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Karlsruhe.
Job Titles:
- Architect
- Visiting Scholar
Claudia Dobles Camargo is an experienced architect, urbanist, and presidential advisor with over 15 years of expertise in urban mobility, social housing, community engagement, climate change, and fair transition.
She served as the first lady of Costa Rica from 2018 to 2022, co-leading the Costa Rican National Decarbonization Plan alongside the president, where she led high-impact resilience and adaptation projects in Costa Rica such as the 82km "Electric Passenger Train" with support from CABEI and the Green Climate Fund as well as the "Water Supply Project for the Tempisque Basin" the most important adaptation project in Costa Rica.
Claudia's achievements include advocating for expanding the roles of the first lady or first gentleman in Costa Rica and promoting gender equality and women's empowerment. Before her role as First Lady, she worked as a regional design leader for a multinational firm, contributing to large-scale projects across Latin America & the Caribbean, and the United States.
Claudia holds a degree in Architecture from the University of Costa Rica and has engaged in sustainability programs at Kanto Gakuin University in Japan. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Design and currently focuses on research at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism on the intersection of climate change and AI.
Job Titles:
- Architect
- Designer
- Senior Lecturer
Cristina Parreño Alonso is a Spanish architect and designer based in Boston. She is also an educator at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where her research Transtectonics explores cultural, contextual and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. Her "tectonic translations" : material transfers across spatial and temporal scales, beyond human and nature, technology and geology; embody narratives that are told in the form of art exhibitions and through architectural installations that activate public spaces.
Her firm Cristina Parreño Architecture was granted with the European Award 40 under 40 in 2014, and the emerging firms award for the "Design Biennial Boston 2015". Her work has been published in the journals JAE, ACADIA, Quaderns, Architect Newspaper. Cristina has taught at the State University of NY at Buffalo, Harvard GSD and MIT School of Architecture and Planning where she currently teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios. Among other venues she has been invited to exhibit her research in the Biennale Architettura di Venezia 2020.
David Birge is a Research Affiliate at Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. He develops novel spatial computational tools to aid the design of more sustainable and resilient urban systems. Specifically, his research focuses on the integrative design of the natural and built environments with technological and social systems. Current topics of inquiry include equitable resilience theory, housing affordability, heat-resilient neighborhood design, water-efficient landscape design, and low-carbon arid neighborhoods.
David Gordon teaches planning history, community design and urban development at Queen's. He has also taught at the University of Toronto, Ryerson, Western Australia, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. Before becoming a professor, David was a professional planner for over 15 years, as director of an urban design firm and project manager for a Toronto waterfront agency. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Planners and has shared their National Award of Distinction three times.
David has written widely on urban planning including the books Planning Twentieth Century Capital Cities (2006) and Planning Canadian Communities (2014 with Gerald Hodge) and Town and Crown: An illustrated history of Canada's capital (2015). His latest research includes histories of Canadian community planning and comparison of Australian and Canadian suburbs.
Dave was Faculty Coordinator of the National Executive Forum on Public Property and is a founding director of the Council for Canadian Urbanism, where he chairs the Research Committee. He also enjoys celebrating the achievements of SURP alumni across Canada, and helping plan the redevelopment of the Queen's campus.
David was born in Ottawa and grew up in Montreal, New Brunswick and Europe. He lives in Upper Canada's oldest neighbourhood, and is active in community environmental and social service organizations. Dave can often be seen cycling around downtown Kingston with his daughter.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning
Cities connect to their environment through infrastructure, comprised of complex and interconnected physical, technological, and social systems. David's research and teaching focus on how to demonstrate new opportunities for planners and policymakers to shape this relationship within these systems using technology, data, and analysis. His work seeks to assist a wide range of actors -- local policymakers, planners, advocates, and academics -- directly with design, planning, policymaking, and policy implementation.
His publications can be found on his Google Scholar profile and the MIT D-space repository, both linked at right.
the effectiveness of benchmarking and disclosure as information policies to reduce the energy consumption of buildings (U.S. Department of Energy);
David is working on a book contracted with the University of Chicago Press on governance of utilities and infrastructure. Other current areas of work and research collaboration include:
opportunities for climate action at the city level;
local, regional, and federal governance of distributed energy resources and energy transitions;
optimal experimental design for air pollution monitoring networks; and
air quality sensing within energy-efficient and electrified buildings, a key pathway to net-zero carbon emissions.
At MIT, David teaches classes on urban technology (11.007), research methods (11.800), and infrastructure (11.381). David is also chair of the DUSP urban science major (11-6); course 11 advisor for the Energy Studies Minor, offered by the MIT Energy Initiative; and is a climate coordinator for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. David is also a faculty member of the MIT Energy Initiative, the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, the Council for the Uncertain Human Future, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, the Roosevelt Project of the MIT Center for Economic and Environmental Policy, and the MIT Committee on Undergraduate Performance.
David taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and worked in structural engineering, real estate finance, and as a policy analyst in the city governments of New York and Seattle. He holds a B.S. from Yale University in physics; a M.S. from Cornell University in applied and engineering physics; a M.Sc. from the London School of Economics and Political Science in city design and social science; and from the University of Washington in Seattle, a Ph.D. in urban design and planning and a certificate in social science and statistics.
Job Titles:
- Associate
- Co - Editor
- Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning Associate Dean, School of Architecture and Planning
- Professor
Associate Dean Lawrence Vale is Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 2002 until January 2009. He has taught in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning since 1988, and he is currently the director of the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI), a unit of the School's Center for Advanced Urbanism. He was president of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History for 2011-2013. Vale holds degrees from Amherst College (B.A. in American Studies, summa cum laude), M.I.T. (S.M.Arch.S.), and the University of Oxford (D.Phil.), which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He is the author or editor of eleven books examining urban design, housing and planning.
Much of Professor Vale's most recent published work has examined the history, politics, and design of American public housing. These books include From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2001 "Best Book in Urban Affairs"); and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (2005 Paul Davidoff Award). This research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has also received the Chester Rapkin Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, an EDRA/Places Award for "Place Research," and the John M. Corcoran Award for Community Investment.
More recently, he has completed another trio of books on public housing. Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities (University of Chicago Press, 2013) focuses on Atlanta and Chicago, comparing the slum clearance era that yielded the first public housing with the current spate of public housing demolition and redevelopment. This book has received "best book" awards from both the International Planning History Society (2014) and the Urban Affairs Association (2015). He his also co-editor, with Nicholas Bloom and Fritz Umbach, of Public Housing Myths: Perceptions, Reality and Social Policy (Cornell University Press 2015; 2016 Best Edited Book Award, International Planning History Society). His latest book, published in early 2019 by Oxford University Press, is After the Projects: Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans This explores the variation of HOPE VI public housing redevelopment practices across the United States, with a focus on New Orleans, Boston, Tucson, and San Francisco. Prior to his work on public housing, Professor Vale was the author of Architecture, Power, and National Identity (1992), a book about capital city design on six continents, which received the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians. A revised, 2nd edition of the book was published by Routledge in 2008. He is also the author of The Limits of Civil Defence (Macmillan and St. Martin's Press, 1987), a book based on his dissertation.
Additionally, Vale is co-editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City: Continuing Struggles and New Directions (2001); co-editor, with Thomas J. Campanella, of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (2005); and co-editor, with Bish Sanyal and Christina Rosan, of Planning Ideas That Matter: Livability, Territoriality, Governance, and Reflective Practice (MIT Press, 2012; 2014 Best Edited Book in Planning History, IPHS). Finally, he is the author of a monograph about the history of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Changing Cities: 75 Years of Planning Better Futures at MIT (SA+P Press, 2008).
At MIT, he has won the Institute's highest award for teaching (MacVicar Faculty Fellowship), and the Institute's highest award for graduate student advising (Frank Perkins Award), as well as multiple departmental awards for advising and service to students.
Dean Santos has received housing awards and honors including the 2009 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. She has won numerous competitions for projects including the Perris Civic Center (CA), three facilities at Arts Park (CA), the Affordable Prototypical Multi-Family Housing for Franklin/LaBrea in Los Angeles, and Penn Children's Center (PA).
Most recently at MIT she was the Principle Investigator for a two year study for Sekisui House, Japan, on sustainable urban housing and community 2050. She, along with fellow MIT faculty and students, have begun a research project with a major firm in China to design and construct a demonstration business park.
She serves as a juror for numerous national and international design competitions and award programs and has published extensively in journals and books.
She holds N.C.A.R.B. Certification, is a registered architect in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania and is a Member of the Pennsylvania Society of Architects, the American Institute of Architects, and the Architect's Registration Council, UK.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Urban Studies and International Development
- Spaulding Career Development Assistant Professor
Delia Duong Ba Wendel is the Spaulding Career Development Assistant Professor in Urban Studies and International Development. Her research engages three main areas: forms of community repair after conflict and disaster; African urbanism; and spatial politics. Her interdisciplinary work draws together Urban Studies, Architectural History, Cultural Geography, and Anthropology.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT
Dennis Frenchman is the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT, where he is Founder and Chair of DesignX, the school's program for accelerating innovation in design cities, and the human environment. He has served as Director of the Center for Real Estate, Associate Dean of the school, chair of the Masters in City Planning degree program, and head of the City Design and Development group. Professor Frenchman has taught and practiced extensively in Asia, Europe, and South America and served as External Advisor on urban livability to the President of the World Bank. An architect and city designer, he has a distinguished record of practice, most recently as senior principal of Tekuma Frenchman Urban Design LLC, with projects in Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Dennis Frenchman's practice and research focuses on the transformation of cities. He is an expert on the application of digital technology to city design and has designed large-scale, media oriented cities and industrial clusters including Seoul Digital Media City in Korea, the Digital Mile in Zaragoza, Spain, Media City: UK in Salford, England, Twofour54 in Abu Dhabi, Ciudad Creativa Digital, Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Medellin Innovation District in Columbia. He has a particular interest in the redevelopment of industrial sites and has prepared plans for the renewal of textile mill towns, canals, rail corridors, steels mills, coal and oil fields, shipyards and ports, including many of international cultural significance. Currently he is leading an MIT research effort to develop new models for clean energy urbanization in China, sponsored by the Energy Foundation.
Professor Frenchman is the author of articles and books on advanced urban design, including Technological Imagination and the Historic City (2008, Ligouri, with William J. Mitchell, et al). His work has been widely recognized including awards from Progressive Architecture, the American Institute of Architects, and three citations from the American Planning Association for the most outstanding projects in the United States.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer and Principal Research Scientist
- Senior Advisor, SA P Infrastructure Initiative
Elisabeth Reynolds is a Lecturer and Principal Research Scientist focused on systems of innovation, regional economic development and industrial competitiveness. Her research and practice centers on regional cluster development and innovation systems as well as advanced manufacturing, growing innovative companies to scale, and building innovation capacity in developed and developing countries.
She recently served in the Biden Administration at the National Economic Council as Special Assistant to the President for Manufacturing and Economic Development from 2021 to October, 2022. In that capacity, she was engaged in many of the country's supply chain challenges as well as helped to develop the Biden Administration's manufacturing agenda and broader industrial strategy including around infrastructure, semiconductors and clean energy.
She was Executive Director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center from 2010 to 2021 and co-led with Professors David Autor and David Mindell MIT's Task Force on the Work of the Future. The Task Force, which ran from 2018-2021, was an institute-wide initiative with 20+ faculty examining the relationship between new technologies such as AI and robotics and the nature of work and how U.S. institutions need to be strengthened to support workers more broadly. In 2021, Autor, Mindell and Reynolds published Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines.
Before coming to MIT for her Ph.D., Reynolds was the Director of the City Advisory Practice at the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC), a non-profit founded by Professor Michael Porter focused on job and business growth in inner city and urban areas.
Lizzie Yarina is a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and is pursuing the Advanced Urbanism concentration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, where her dissertation investigates the spatial politics of climate change adaptation in delta regions. She is presently co-editing a volume on the relationship between climate models and the built environment with a multi-disciplinary team of editors and contributors. Previously she was Research Scientist at the MIT Urban Risk Lab, where she was part of a team examining alternatives to FEMA's post-disaster housing systems and conducted research on disaster preparedness in Japan.
In 2017, Yarina was a Fulbright New Zealand research fellow, where she examined the spatial implications of climate change migration. She has worked as a designer at PLY Architecture, William Rawn Associates, and Dada Architecture (Beijing), and has taught at the Singapore University of Technology and Design and the Victoria University of Wellington. Her research on the relationships among design thinking, territorial politics, and climate risk has been published in JAE, Architecture and Culture, Places, The Plan Journal, and Arch+. Yarina holds a joint Masters in Architecture and Masters of City Planning from MIT, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Landscape Architecture
Eran Ben-Joseph is the Class of 1922 Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Eran served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT from 2013 to 2020.
Eran's research and teaching areas include urban and physical design, standards and regulations, sustainable site planning technologies and urban retrofitting. He authored and co-authored the books: Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities, Regulating Place: Standards and the Shaping of Urban America, The Code of the City, RENEW Town, ReThinking a Lot and New Industrial Urbanism. Eran worked as a city planner, urban designer and landscape architect in Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the United States on projects including new towns and residential developments, streetscapes, stream restorations, and parks and recreation planning. He has led national and international multi-disciplinary projects in Singapore, Barcelona, Santiago, Tokyo and Washington DC among other places.
Eran holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and Chiba National University of Japan. Current Research: Health and the Aging Population, Ecological Models of Development, Industrial Urbanism, Historical Neighborhood Planning, Mobility Infrastructure .
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor of International Development and Urban Planning Director, City Infrastructure Equity Lab
Gabriella is an associate professor of urban planning and international development in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) at MIT, where she leads the City Infrastructure Equity Lab (CIEL). CIEL works toward building more equitable infrastructure systems, providing recommendations for how the governance of urban infrastructure systems can more equitably shape infrastructure benefits and community health outcomes. Gabriella's research explores these potentials through studies of the distributive, procedural, and epistemic equity behind the financial architecture, evaluation, and project partnering practices of infrastructure development. Her work especially centers on the water and sanitation domain across urban communities in the Americas and Africa, and has been published in journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning A, and the American Journal of Public Health, among others.
Job Titles:
- Tunney Lee Distinguished Lecturer in Urbanism
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Artist
Gediminas Urbonas is an artist, educator, researcher and co-founder of US: Urbonas Studio (together with Nomeda Urbonas), an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Urbonas also collaborate with experts in different cultural fields to develop practice-based artistic research models that allow participants - including their students - to pursue projects that merge urbanism, new media, social sciences and pedagogy to critically address the transformation of civic space and ecology.
Urbonas have exhibited internationally including the São Paulo (twice), Berlin, Moscow (twice), Lyon, Gwangju, Busan Biennales, Folkestone Triennial - and Manifesta and Documenta exhibitions - among numerous other international shows, including a solo show at the Venice Biennale and MACBA in Barcelona. Their work was awarded a number of high level grants and residency awards, including the Lithuanian National Prize (2007); a Prize for the Best International Artist at the Gwangju Biennale (2006) and the Prize for the best national pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2007). Urbonas are co-founders of the JUTEMPUS interdisciplinary art program (1993), the first independent artist-led initiative in Lithuania; Vilnius Interdisciplinary Lab for Media Art (VILMA); the VOICE, a net based publication on media culture (www.balsas.cc); they are co-founders of the Transaction Archive and co-directors of the Pro-test Lab Archive.
Their writing on artistic research as form of intervention into social and political crisis was published in the books Devices for Action (2008) by MACBA Press, Barcelona and Villa Lituania (2008) by Sternberg Press. Urbonas co-edited Public Space? Lost and Found (MIT Press, 2017) that brings together artists, planners, theorists and art historians in an examination of the complex inter-relations between the creation and uses of public space and the roles that public art plays therein. Urbonas 5 year-long research project on Zooetics exploring the potential to connect with the noetics and poetics of non-human life in the context of the planetary ecological imbalance, concluded in 2018 with the symposium at MIT and opened a new research program focusing on sympoiesis. Urbonases curated the Swamp School - future learning environment at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. The book Swamps and the New Imagination: On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture and Philosophy published by Sternberg Press and distributed by MIT Press, is forthcoming in 2020.
Job Titles:
- Manager
- Specialist
- Visiting Scholar
Giuliano Picchi is a cultural manager and creative economy specialist with expertise in cultural leadership, entrepreneurship, and academic research on art systems and markets, including their business models and gatekeeping dynamics. He holds certifications in Cultural Diplomacy and International Cooperation from ISPI Milan and in Intellectual Property from WIPO in Geneva, a Master's degree in Economics and Management of Arts and Culture from Ca' Foscari University in Venice, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Sapienza University in Rome.
Giuliano founded the international NGO UNITA - United Talents for the Future, focusing on experimental multidisciplinary projects that support creative careers and promote research on the broader socio-economic impact of cultural and creative activities. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of Scenography Today, an online magazine that promotes mobility and excellence in the scenic arts.
At MIT, he serves as a Cultural Entrepreneur in Residence in the MITdesignX program, where his work focuses on micro-entrepreneurship for students and professionals from creative disciplines. He is a fellow at Harvard University in the Cultural Agents group, where he explores the measurability of creative practices' impact on health, education, and civic engagement.
In urbanism, his research interests center on the relationship between cultural assets and the performance of other urban systems. He inquires how arts and creative products can lead to behavior changes and serve as a bridge, enabling citizens to contribute their insights and preferences to co-design and co-governance applications and to the datasets that inform future generative AI models shaping the city.
Heidi Nepf is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. She earned a PhD in Civil Engineering from Stanford University ('92), and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before arriving at MIT in 1993. She is internationally known for her work on the impact of vegetation on flow and transport in rivers, wetlands, lakes and coastal zones. In recognition for this work, she was awarded a US National Science Foundation Career Award. Dr. Nepf also served on the National Research Council panel charged with the review of the Army Corps plans for restoration and protection of the Louisiana coastline. She is a member of the Fluid Mechanics Steering Committee of IAHR and has served or is serving on the editorial boards of Limnology and Oceanography, Water Resources Research, Environmental Fluid Mechanics, and Journal of Hydraulic Engineering.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Aga Khan Assistant Professor
Huma Gupta is the Aga Khan Assistant Professor in Islamic Architecture at MIT. As a historian of the built environment, urban policy expert, and filmmaker, she specializes in the history and theory of informality, forced migration, and biogenic architecture in the global south. Dr. Gupta's first book project The Architecture of Dispossession theorizes the relationship between state-building and dispossession through architectural transformations of migrant reed and earth dwellings in 20th century Iraq. Dr. Gupta holds a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture and a Master's in City Planning from MIT. Previously, she was the Neubauer Junior Research Fellow at Brandeis University, Humanities Research Fellow at New York University-Abu Dhabi, and International Dissertation Research Fellow at the Social Science Research Council. Her work has been published by the International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of Contemporary Iraq and the Arab World, Yale University Press, Intellect Books, and Thresholds.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Geography
James L. Wescoat, Jr. is Aga Khan Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture and Geography. He joined the AKPIA program in 2008 and taught courses on "Islamic Architecture and the Environment," "Islamic Gardens and Geographies," "Water in Planning, Policy, and Design," "Disaster-Resilient Design," and various landscape and urbanism workshops in India and the U.S. Many of these courses were co-listed in Architecture and Urban Studies and Planning. Jim coordinated the SMArchS Urbanism program and co-directed MIT's Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism for three years. He continues to follow and have an interest in AKPIA, LCAU and Urbanism programs, students, and alumni.
Jim's research concentrates on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For much of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on small-scale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. He led the Smithsonian Institution's project titled, "Garden, City, and Empire: The Historical Geography of Mughal Lahore," which resulted in a co-edited volume on Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, Prospects , and The Mughal Garden: Interpretation, Conservation, and Implications with colleagues from the University of Engineering and Technology-Lahore. These and related books have won awards from the Government of Pakistan and Punjab Government. The overall Mughal Gardens Project won an American Society of Landscape Architects national research merit award, as did a project on The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj led by Elizabeth Moynihan. This work has been generously supported by fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art, and the American Academy in Rome. He continues to research and write about historic water systems in Agra, Delhi, Lahore, and Kashmir.
At the larger scale, Jim has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins. He led a USEPA-funded study of potential climate impacts in the Indus River Basin in Pakistan with the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). He contributed to a subsequent World Bank study of climate change in the Indus basin in 2014. In 2003, he published Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White (Cambridge University Press); and in 2007 he co-edited Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power (Springer Publishing) for LAF Landscape Futures Initiative. He has chaired National Research Council studies of Glen Canyon Dam, lower Great Lakes, and Mississippi River delta.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning
Janelle Knox-Hayes is the Lister Brothers Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. She holds a visiting research fellowship at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at Oxford University. Her research focuses on the ways in which social and environmental systems are governed under changing temporal and spatial scales as a consequence of globalization. She has studied the political and economic interface of financial markets and environmental systems and how individuals and organizations plan and make decisions under conditions of socio-economic uncertainty. Her latest project examines how social values shape sustainable development. Janelle has been the recipient of an SSRC Abe Fellowship for study of environmental finance in the Asia-Pacific and a Fulbright Fellowship for study of sustainable decision-making in Iceland. Janelle is the author of a number of peer-reviewed works in prestigious journals and presses. She serves as an editor of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society.
Prior to joining DUSP, Janelle was an associate professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. She completed her BA (Summa Cum Laude) in International Affairs, Ecology, and Japanese Language and Civilizations from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2004 and her MSc (with Distinction) and DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2006 and 2009 respectively. Before starting graduate school, Janelle worked as an energy analyst for the United States Government Accountability Office. While in graduate school, she also worked as an energy analyst for New Energy Finance.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Associate Professor of Transportation and City Planning Director, MIT Mobility Initiative
Jinhua Zhao is the Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prof. Zhao brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility system, and reform urban policies. He develops methods to sense, predict, nudge, and regulate travel behavior and designs multimodal mobility systems that integrate automated and shared mobility with public transport. He sees transportation as a language to describe a person, characterize a city, and understand an institution and aims to establish the behavioral foundation for transportation systems and policies.
Prof. Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab at MIT and leads long-term research collaborations with major transportation authorities and operators worldwide, including London, Chicago, Hong Kong, and Singapore. He is the co-director of the Mobility Systems Center of the MIT Energy Initiative, and the director of the MIT Mobility Initiative. He very much enjoys working with students.
Job Titles:
- Board Member of New Ecology, Inc
- Professor, Department of Architecture
John E. Fernández, class of 1985, has been on the faculty of MIT since 1999. He is a full Professor and Director of the Building Technology Program in the Department of Architecture and is Director of the Urban Metabolism Group, a highly multidisciplinary research group focused on the resource intensity of cities and design and technology pathways for future urbanization. He is also co-Director of the International Design Center at MIT, a large internationally funded center for design studies across engineering and architecture.
He is author of two books, numerous articles in scientific and design journals including Science, the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Building and Environment, Energy Policy and others, author of nine book chapters and a frequently invited speaker at conferences and symposia worldwide. He has organized, chaired or co-chaired 7 international conferences. He is Chair of Sustainable Urban Systems for the International Society of Industrial Ecology and Associate Editor of the journal Sustainable Cities and Society.
The MIT Urban Metabolism Group, founded by Fernández in 2008 has been at the forefront of establishing an understanding of the resource intensity of urbanization. Research has included material flow analysis of a number of cities in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Recent projects include an examination of the Chinese building sector to identify sustainable transition pathways for provinces and cities, a system dynamics model for the Singapore water system, an alternative urban technology development scenario for Lagos, Nigeria, and the development of a global typology of urban resource consumption based on a comprehensive analysis of urban resource intensity data. The Global Typology of Urban Resource Consumption has influenced urban thinking and policy development at international agencies, partner universities, and academic centers and spawned several new initiatives examining the implications for technology development for specific city types.
Fernández is currently a Board member of New Ecology, Inc. in Boston, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Center for Sustainable Energy of the Fraunhofer Institute, also in Boston. Fernández has participated in the launch of two startup companies in the past 5 years. Fernández has also served many years on a number of MIT committees including the Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Financial Aid, the Committee on the Undergraduate Program, the ROTC Oversight committee, and currently the Committee on the Innovation Initiative, the Faculty Policy Committee, and the Institute Planning Committee. He has also served on various special groups and task force including the subcommittee on the Implementation of the Recommendations of the Task Force on the Undergraduate Educational Commons, the Working Group on the Future of Teaching and Learning Spaces at MIT, the School of Architecture and Planning Dean's Diversity Committee, the Dean's Energy and Environment Council, and currently, the Campus Sustainability Task Force, the MIT Materials and Waste Management Working Group, and the Metropolitan Warehouse Advisory Group.
Job Titles:
- Abdul Latif Jameel Professor
John H. Lienhard V is Abdul Latif Jameel Professor and the Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT. During more than three decades on the MIT faculty, Lienhard's research and educational efforts have focused on water purification and desalination, heat and mass transfer, and thermodynamics. He has also filled a number of administrative roles at MIT. Lienhard received his bachelors (summa cum laude) and masters degrees in thermal engineering at UCLA from the Chemical, Nuclear, and Thermal Engineering Department, where he worked on thermal instabilities in solar collectors and evaporating meniscus measurements for desalination systems. He joined MIT immediately after completing his PhD in the Applied Mechanics and Engineering Science Department at UC San Diego, where he did experimental work on thermally stratified turbulent flows. Since coming to MIT, Lienhard has worked on desalination processes, liquid jet impingement, high heat flux engineering, electronics thermal management, and other topics. His research in desalination includes humidification-dehumidification desalination, membrane distillation desalination, forward and reverse osmosis, fouling and scale formation, electrodialysis, nanofiltration, management of high salinity brines, solar-driven desalination, thermodynamic and energy efficiency analysis of desalination cycles, and energy-water nexus issues. Lienhard has directly supervised 100 graduate theses and postdoctoral associates. He is the author of more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has been issued 38 US patents.
Lienhard is a recipient of the 1988 National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award, the 1992 SAE Teetor Award, a 1997 R&D 100 Award, the 2012 ASME Globalization Medal, the 2015 ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award, the 2019 ASME Edward F. Obert Award (in thermodynamics), and the 2021 AIChE Donald Q. Kern Award (for expertise in heat transfer, transport phenomena, and energy conversion). He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Society of Thermal and Fluid Engineers. He has been the Director of the Rohsenow Kendall Heat Transfer Laboratory since 1997. Lienhard is the co-author of textbooks on heat transfer, on thermal modeling, and on measurement and instrumentation. His heat transfer book has been available online at no charge since 2002, and hundreds of thousands of copies have been downloaded worldwide. His measurements book has sold more than 130,000 copies. He has created new courses on desalination, on thermal modeling, and on compressible fluid mechanics. He has also received several teaching and mentoring awards at MIT. Professor Lienhard was the founding director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy from 2008 to 2017. He was also the founding director of the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women from 2009 to 2017.
Lienhard holds Professional Engineering licenses in Massachusetts and Vermont.
Joris Komen is a PhD candidate in the Department of Architecture's Design and Computation Group, and is pursuing the Advanced Urbanism concentration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
Joris's research is framed by human-wildlife interaction, adaptive behavioral wildlife biology, ecological literacy and the critical role wildlife will play in defining the future city. His investigations explore how computational frameworks can help the distribution of wildlife habitat and human settlement pattern reconcile with design theory, particularly though questions of authorship and emergence. His work evaluates the convergence of behavioral wildlife ecology and urban development practices in postcolonial communities of sub Saharan Africa in an effort to understand the socio-spatial influence of wildlife populations on emergent human settlement practices.
Joris holds a Masters of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has worked for Architects, Design Researchers, National Parks and Wildlife Rehabilitation Centers in Namibia, Ghana, Brazil and the U.S.A. In 2017, Joris founded humaneLABS, a wildlife architecture praxis with ongoing projects in Southern Africa and the U.S.A.
Job Titles:
- Artist and Writer
- Professor and Director
Judith Barry is an artist and writer whose work combines a number of disciplines including installation and project-based research, architecture/exhibition design, film/video, performance art/dance, sculpture, photography, and digital media.
She has exhibited internationally at such venues as the Berlin Biennale, Venice Biennale(s) of Art/Architecture, Sharjah Biennial, Sao Paolo Biennale, Nagoya Biennale, Carnegie International, Whitney Biennale, Sydney Biennale, and Documenta, among others. Her awards include the Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts 2000 and "Best Pavilion" at the Cairo Biennale, 2001. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship recipient.
Justin Kollar is a PhD candidate at MIT and is pursing the Advanced Urbanism concentration with the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU). His research and professional experience in architecture and urban planning brings a social and economic perspective to the design of the spatial and built environment across multiple scales. He holds master's degrees in Architecture and Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and completed a bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Planning. Justin's work is situated at the intersection of territorial studies, resilience planning, administrative landscapes, infrastructural ecology, and institutional development in cities in North America as well as across Central, Southeast, and East Asia.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Law and Urban Planning
Justin Steil (CV) is an Associate Professor of Law and Urban Planning. His research analyzes how power and inequality are created and contested through control over access to particular places. As a lawyer and urban planner, his scholarship disentangles how the structure of local governance and land use law interacts with housing policies to shape the spatial structure of our social world in ways that produce economic and racial inequality. He also analyzes how civil rights laws and planning, zoning, and housing policies can be redesigned to increase equality of access to resources and advance racial justice. Recent scholarship has focused on the relationship between space, power, and inequality in three main areas: 1) environmental justice, especially the intersection of housing and climate change related disasters; 2) affordable housing and housing discrimination; and 3) local governance and land use regulation.
He is the co-editor of three books: Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America's Neighborhoods (2021); The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, and Opportunity (2019); and Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice (2009).
Job Titles:
- Designer
- Researcher
- Associate Professor Director, Computation Group
Larry Sass is an architectural designer and researcher exploring digital design and fabrication across scales. As an associate professor in the Department of Architecture at MIT, Larry has taught courses specifically in digital fabrication and design computing since 2002. He earned his PhD ‘00 and SMArchS '94 at MIT, and has a BArch from Pratt Institute in NYC. Larry has published widely, and has exhibited his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Larry's research focused on digital delivery of housing for low income families. Main ideas are centered on discovery and development of new design tools that automated the production of design models and and aid in fabrication of finished construction. He believes that hand crafted, hand operated construction will soon be a thing of the past, and that in the future, buildings will be printed with machines run by computers. Today in the age of manufacturing with information and and new forms of machine intelligence more than ever designers will need new tools to produce their ideas. His latest obsession is development of fabrication based software that helps designers and builders physical produce ideas from 3D computer models.
Norford specializes in energy studies, controls, and ventilation and is seeking to improve the way buildings use the earth's resources. With Tabors Caramanis and Associates, he consults in the areas of electric utility energy conservation, electricity pricing, and control of thermal storage systems. Before his appointment to the school's faculty in 1988, Norford was for four years a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. At that time he was a research engineer at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies at Princeton University. From 1974 to 1979 he was a nuclear power engineer with the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.
Trained as a mechanical engineer, Les Norford has focused on the sustainable design and operation of buildings since the oil shocks of the 1970s. He specializes in building energy measurements and simulations, building system diagnostics and controls, natural and mechanical ventilation, and the development of efficient cooling systems. Recently, his participation in the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology has led to a growing interest in the interaction of buildings and the urban environment, a key aspect of the urban heat island effect. As an educator, he teaches classes in energy and building design, building ventilation and HVAC systems and an undergraduate building technology laboratory that focuses on schools and housing in developing countries. He has served as Associate Head of the Department of Architecture since 2006.
Before his appointment to the MIT faculty in 1988, Norford was for four years a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University and a postdoctoral associate and research engineer at Princeton's Center for Energy and Environmental. From 1974 to 1979 he was a nuclear power engineer with the US Navy and the US Department of Energy. A former partner of Tabors Caramanis and Associates, he has consulted in the areas of electric utility energy conservation, electricity pricing, and control of thermal storage systems.
Norford earned his BS in engineering science from Cornell University in 1973 and his PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University in 1984. He is a member of the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, the American Meteorological Society, the International Building Performance Simulation Association and the International Association for Urban Climate and has published in journals serving building energy analysts and urban climatologists.
Job Titles:
- Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design
- Research Affiliate
Lorena Bello Gómez is Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Through international grants, she works with local foundations and NGOs in collaboration with interdisciplinary teams as a way to connect design expertise and political will to positively impact regenerative change and climatic adaptation. She has received support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in Spain (2016), the Aga Khan Foundation in India (2017-2018), Fundación Social in Colombia (2017-), TUMO Foundation in Armenia (2018), the David Rockefeller DRCLAS in Mexico (2018-), and UKPACT Mexico Program (2021-). She has also engaged in workshops with universities and/or governments in Colombia, Japan, Spain, Mexico, China, and Portugal. Out of these collaborations, publications include: Beyond Reconstruction, City in Transition, and Disaster Resilient Housing. Bello´s work has been exhibited at the 2018 Venice Biennale and at MIT´s Media Lab.
Prior to the GSD, Bello was lecturer in architecture and urbanism at MIT SA+P (2013-2021) and Visiting Professor in architecture and urbanism at Porto University´s FAUP (2020-2021). During her time at MIT Lorena collaborated on design projects at the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism.
Her design research focuses on the territorial implications of infrastructure as catalysts for design. She started examining this topic in her dissertation "Hybrid Networks"-with the guidance of Joan Busquets and the late Manuel de Solá-Morales-to portray the slow geography of the European ¨camino network¨ toward the Romans´ World End in Finisterrae. Caminos are resilient and millenary cultural itineraries that combine continuous upgrades and recalibration to fuse history, art, religion´s geopolitics, territorial urban design and landscape to create a public and open platform regardless of race, class, or religion. Since then, Lorena has applied some of these lessons when working with environmentally vulnerable communities engulfed in climatic risks in India, Colombia, Armenia, and Mexico.
Bello began her architectural career in Barcelona as project director at Aldayjover Architecture and Landscape, where she led projects at different scales including those within the Water Park 2008 international exhibit in Zaragoza. She was also research assistant at the Joan Miró Foundation and the Building Tech Institute of Catalonia (ITEC). Bello holds a Master in Architecture with honors from Barcelona UPC (MArch´05), a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard GSD (MAUD´11), and a European PhD in Urbanism from Barcelona UPC (PhD´15).
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Health
- Social Epidemiologist and Urban Planner
Mariana Arcaya is a social epidemiologist and urban planner whose work explores dynamic relationships between geographic contexts, particularly neighborhoods, and health. Mariana conducts scholarly and policy-relevant research in two main areas: 1) bi-directional relationships between place and health, including how health considerations shape socioeconomic outcomes for individuals and communities, and, 2) applied and translational research on the social determinants of health, particularly health risk factors shaped by urban policy and planning decisions.
Prior to coming to MIT in 2015, Mariana served as a post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She holds a Doctorate of Science from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a Master of City Planning from MIT's Department of Urban Studies & Planning. Her professional work experience includes instituting and managing a Public Health Division within Metropolitan Boston's regional planning agency, as well as designing and overseeing the implementation of healthy urban planning strategies under a federally funded Community Transformation Grant.
Job Titles:
- Architect
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor at MIT Dept of Architecture
Mark Goulthorpe is an Associate Professor at MIT Dept of Architecture, teaching in undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate programs, and undergoing research in digital design and fabrication. He is currently Head of the new Design Stream in the SMArchS program. Current research centers on robotic fabrication and a variety of composite fabrication methodologies, as well as a new iteration of the dynamically reconfigurable HypoSurface. In particular, the Zero+ housing targets a ubiquitous new building technology that looks to bring a radical new methodology into second world markets where global housing needs are extremely pressing.
He has two published books: ‘Autoplastic to Alloplastic' by Hyx/Pompidou, articulates via design projects the shifts in design methodology occasioned by digital technologies; and ‘The Possibility of (an) Architecture' by Routledge theorizes the broad implications of a digital paradigm for architecture. A forthcoming book is in draft form, ‘Paramorph', which foregrounds the design and fabrication research that lies behind the evolving projects. There are many published essays and articles by Goulthorpe and on the work of dECOi and HypoSurface in journals.
Goulthorpe is also a practicing architect, acting as creative and technical director of 3 groups of networked inter-disciplinary teams: dECOi Architects, HypoSurface, and Zero+. Current projects include a fully cnc-milled wooden office interior, One Main (Cambridge) evidencing a radical carbon-negative manufacturing potential (with designer, Raphael Crespin); a new electromagnetic HypoSurface commission for the National Museum of Energy in Spain (NME) establishing real-time physical interactivity of architectural surfaces (with digital artist, Marc Downie and digital composer, Paul Steenhuisen); the Paramorph carbon-fiber penthouse as an extension to a towertop adjacent to Tate Modern (London) with parametric modeling by Kaustuv de Biswas, PhD; and a research initiative with IDC (Singapore) for Zero+ thermoplastic housing (with composites engineer, Mark Bishop, CAD/CAM by Stelios Dritsas at IDC, FEA by Sawako Kaijima at IDC, environmental design by Vasco Portugal, PhD, and LCA by Prof Mike Lepech at Stanford). Each project probes new modes of materializing architecture via digital technologies, pressing to innovating design, fabrication and material logics to attain new formal sophistication and technical efficiencies.
In 2011 Goulthorpe established a large-scale Kuka robotic fabrication facility as part of the IDC collaboration between MIT and SUTD (Singapore University of Technology and Design), which will look to researching new manufacturing and material potentials. He is recipient of a MISTI award that will run a workshop Compose_It House with Alex Tsamis, PhD in collaboration with the Design Lab at the Adolfo Ibanez University (UIA), Chile.
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- Associate Professor of the Practice of Urban Design and Planning
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- Administrative Assistant II
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- Professor, Head of Architecture
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- Professor of Mobility and Urban Planning
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- Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism
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- Principal
- Research Associate
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- Director, Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning