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We are delighted to announce that Dr Mariana Pereira Guimarães has received a College of Arts, Social Sciences and Celtic Studies (CASSCS) Visiting Fellowship to work with UrbanLab Galway as part of her ongoing research on urban climate resilience and citizen science. Mariana will join us at UrbanLab Galway, in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies, in August.  

Mariana Pereira Guimarães is an environmental health planner, architect, and urban climate scientist whose work sits at the meeting point of urban planning, public health, and climate science. She earned her PhD Cum Laude from the Politécnico di Milano and holds a joint Master's in Urban Planning and Public Health from Harvard University, where her public health studies followed the Human Health, Sustainability, and Global Environmental Change track at the Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (Harvard Chan C-CHANGE). She first trained as both an architect and a civil engineer at the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.

Much of her interdisciplinary outlook took shape during her years in the United States. She was a Fox International Fellow at Yale University and a fellow of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, and at the Harvard Graduate School of Design she worked across several of its design and research groups, among them the Zofnass Program for Sustainable Infrastructure, the Healthy Places Design Lab, and the Critical Landscapes Lab. At Yale, she also collaborated with Prof. Alexander Felson's former Urban Ecology and Design Laboratory (UEDLAB). Alongside this research, Mariana has worked directly with communities and city governments such as São Paulo, Toronto, Boston and Tirana. In Tirana, Albania, she supported the City's "City for Children, City for All" programme within the Bernard van Leer Foundation's Urban 95 initiative, pairing stakeholder engagement with baseline research to create an indicator's data package on the everyday needs of infants, toddlers, and their caregivers.

Mariana completed her doctorate within SOLOCLIM (Solutions for Outdoor Climate Adaptation), a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Innovative Training Network (ITN) funded under the EU's Horizon 2020 programme, which brought three universities (Wageningen University, the University of Kent, and the Politecnico di Milano) together with four industry partners (Foster + Partners, Carlo Ratti Associati, ZinCo, and Arcadis). The network trained a small cohort of early-career researchers to develop vegetation, water, and responsive design solutions for the urban (micro)climate, at scales ranging from single buildings to whole neighborhoods. As part of this programme, Mariana spent two years at Arcadis in the Netherlands as a consultant on nature-based solutions. Mariana is dedicated to advancing innovation in planning, design, public health, water resources, and urban (micro)climate to promote healthier, sustainable, and inclusive cities.