Architecture & Urban Planning

Fellow

Maria Lopez Vazquez

2025 Fellow
Maria Lopez Vazquez is a multicultural landscape designer from the border region of Tijuana-San Diego (MX-US). She has a Bachelors of Landscape Architecture from UC Berkeley. By pursuing her Master's in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, she hopes to inform her landscape design practice with sustainable efforts as an artist and maker.
Fellow Story

Nguyen takes role at Just Cities Institute

The Just Cities Institute advances racial justice in public policy and urban planning through transformative models of participatory and community-based design.
May 9, 2025
Fellow Story

Kirk launches Rent Brigade to track rent-gouging in the wake of the LA fires

Following the Los Angeles fires, Chelsea Kirk launched The Rent Brigade: “a collective of tenant organizers, advocates, web programmers, designers, researchers, and other Angelenos using data to fight back against predatory landlords”...
March 31, 2025
Fellow Story

Diezmartinez and Short publish on climate justice imaginaries as tools for evaluation

By offering new “possibilities of policy evaluation” that emerge from climate justice imaginaries in Boston, this paper showcases how visions of the just and unjust city can serve as governing devices to transform policy evaluation practices and advance more just climate futures.
January 30, 2025
Fellow Story

Monika Shankar: Unearthing the role of soils in urban climate resilience planning

Urban soils are often overlooked in climate resilience planning and policy. In their October 2024 Nature comment article, Shankar and co-authors advocate for a broader framing of urban soils within an equity-centred social ecological...
November 26, 2024
Fellow Story

Grove reviews how environmental justice and urban ecology interact

The review paper asks how environmental justice and urban ecology have influenced one another over the past 25 years in the context of the US Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program and Baltimore Ecosystem Study (BES) project.
August 26, 2024
Fellow

Sanjana Paul

2024 Fellow
Sanjana is an engineer, environmental justice researcher, and systems thinker working at the intersection of infrastructure, climate, and technology. She is a PhD student at MIT, where her research focuses on renewable energy, energy justice, and the electric grid. She is the co-founder of Rooted Futures Lab, a research and action collective advancing environmental justice in technology, and Earth Hacks, a nonprofit harnessing hackathons as a form of climate action. Her work has ranged from atmospheric science software engineering at NASA to passing decarbonization policy at the local level. She holds a BS in electrical engineering and physics, and a Master’s in City Planning from MIT.
Fellow

Nicole Wong

2024 Fellow
Nicole explores the intersection of affordable housing and climate equity, including building energy retrofit strategies that can reduce energy burden, prevent displacement, and target climate investments to low-income communities of color.
Fellow

Jazz Henry

2024 Fellow
Jazz's studies are concentrated in sustainability and design/development. He has worked on issues such as extreme heat, air quality, community engagement and schoolyard greening.
Fellow

Chelsea Kirk

2024 Fellow
Chelsea is driven by the belief that we cannot solve our climate crisis by exacerbating our housing crisis. Her work empowers tenants in building decarbonization efforts, ensuring they benefit from climate initiatives.