Álvaro Siza is one of the most distinguished and highly awarded architects in the world. He works in Porto, Portugal. "Every design," says Siza, "is a rigorous attempt to capture a concrete moment of a transitory image in all its nuances. The extent to which this transitory quality is captured, is reflected in the designs: the more precise they are, the more vulnerable."

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Siza, whose full name is Álvaro Joaquim de Melo Siza Vieira, was born on June 25, 1933 in the small coastal town of Matosinhos, just north of Porto, Portugal. Siza studied at the University of Porto School of Architecture from 1949 through 1955, completing his first built works (four houses in Matosinhos) even before ending his studies in 1954.

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In 1966, Siza began teaching at the University, and in 1976, he was made a tenured Professor of Architecture. In addition to his teaching there, he has been a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the University of Pennsylvania; Los Andes University of Bogota; and the Ecole Polytechnique of Lausanne. In addition, he has been a guest lecturer at many universities and conferences throughout the world, from the United States, Colombia and Argentina to Spain, Germany, France, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria and England in Europe.

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He received the Pritzker Prize in 1992. He also received honors from foundations and institutions in Europe, including the Alvar Aalto Foundation Gold Medal in 1988, the renowned Mies van der Rohe Foundation Award the Borges & Irmao Bank in Vila do Conde, Portugal (1982-86) and many others.

Andrea Chiba is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science and in the Program for Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Chiba earned her bachelor’s from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught high school math. She earned her PhD in neuroscience from the University of Utah. She is Co-Director and the founding Science Director of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF Science of Learning Center. The Center research is focused on the importance of time and timing in various aspects of learning, from the level of the synapse to social interactions. Chiba is involved in many Center projects that allow cross-species comparisons of learning and memory, bridging from rodent to human. 

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Dr. Chiba’s Laboratory is focused on gaining an understanding of the neural systems and principles underlying aspects of learning, memory, affect, and attention, with an emphasis on neural plasticity. Work in her laboratory is highly interdisciplinary, using a variety of neurobiological, neurochemical, neurophysiology, computational, robotic, and behavioral techniques.

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Dr. Chiba has authored dozens of papers and other publications and has organized and participated in international workshops to help educators and policy-makers understand how the science of learning provides a strong foundation for educational excellence.

Andrea Soto Morfín is an architect from ITESO University, in 2015 she won the CEMEX Architect Marcelo Zambrano Scholarship through which she studied the Master in Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, graduating with distinction in 2017 and obtaining recognition from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) for Academic excellence. Since 2010, she has been co-director of ATELIER ARS founded by Alejandro Guerrero. Together, they have received the Emerging Voices award, given by The Architectural League of New York and the Design Vanguard from the Architectural Record magazine, both awards in the year 2015.

Their work has been nominated for the Mies Crown Hall America’s Prize that is granted by the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and has been a finalist in the Ibero-American Architecture and Urbanism Biennial in Sao Paulo, Brasil. She has been lecturer at Harvard Latin GSD, UBC SALA 2020, as well as guest critic at Harvard GSD and UVA. Some of their work became part of the Official Exhibition of Mexico’s Pavilion at the Architecture Venice Biennial in 2014, 2016 and 2018. They obtained a Silver Medal in the XV Mexican Architecture Biennial and were finalists in the Emerging Architects prize from the Architectural Review magazine in 2018. Their work has been recognized and 1st prized at the III Latin American Biennial of Landscape Architecture. In 2019 as part of the event Mantovarchitettura 2019 they participated as lecturers and their work was presented in the international exhibition “Diseñando México” of the Milan Polytechnic, Polo Territorial di Mantova, in collaboration with CASABELLA.

Their proposals are the result of a deep reflection regarding the role of history in the architectural project. They come from the idea of a living tradition, that is recreated in the idea of continuity and that simultaneously shows a concern to connect with life in the present. Their work develops through very different scales; from the design of furniture, gardens, single-family houses, to industrial-type and landscape projects; always with a special attention in the manufacture, the materials, and attending also the relation of the local craftsmen with the constructive techniques of the present. Their current work focuses on researching and proposing new relationships between the disciplines of landscape and architecture.

Antonio Riggen-Martinez was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1966. He studied at the ITESO School of Architecture in Guadalajara, Mexico, between 1984 and 1990. He finished his first built project in 1991. Riggen Martinez holds a master’s degree in “Art, architecture, city” in 1994 from ETSAB Barcelona, Spain. His thesis was directed and published by Josep Quétglas. During 1993- 1995, he produced and published in Italy with the Electa publishing house the monograph entitled “Luis Barragán 1902-88”, later published in the English language by The Monacelli Press, New York, in 1997. Along with his booking publications, Riggen Martinez has written several essays, magazines, and newspapers in Mexico and Spain. He has been a visiting professor at ETSAB, Spain, continuing his academic activity at ITESO and ITESM, Guadalajara, Mexico.

Between 1999 and 2000, he prepared and published with El Croquis Editorial Madrid the monograph on “Escritos y Conversaciones de Luis Barragán.” In 2005, he published the monograph on Fernando González Gortázar in the collection Monographs of 20th-century architects by the Mexican Ministry of Culture. In 2009 Riggen Martinez published the monograph entitled “Luis Barragán - 25 Transparencias Inheditas” with the Mudito & Co. publishing house from Barcelona, Spain. Between 1995 and 1996, he worked with Tonet Sunyer in Barcelona, Spain. From 1997 to date, he has worked and teamed with Teresa Pijuan at the firm Riggen + Pijuan architects.

David Kirsh is professor & past chair at the Cognitive Science Department, University of California San Diego. During 2017-2019 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture University College London where he continues part-time. He is currently President of ANFA. He received a D. Phil. From Oxford Univ in Philosophy & Cognitive Science, did post-doctoral work in Artificial Intelligence at MIT (AI Lab), and held Research or Visiting Professor positions at: MIT - Comp Sci, Stanford Univeristy - Grad School of Education, Comp Sci, Music upcoming, Univ College London - Comp Sci, Architecture, Paris University - Sociology, Comp Sci, Adjunct Prof in Dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. 

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He has written extensively on situated cognition, especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world, and how human environments have been adapted to enable us cope with the complexity of everyday life. Some recent projects focus on ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making, how thought unfolds in many modalities, and how new media tools are reshaping thought, especially in the different stages of design. He is currently working on a new theory of interaction and visual reasoning.

David Dorenbaum, MD (México, 1956), is a psychoanalyst, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Lacan Clinical Forum at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His essays
appear in various publications that have resulted from collaborations with artists and museums. He is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País. His most recent essay appears in the book Kings Road Mona Kuhn (Steidl, 2021).

This project is the result of a collaboration with photographer Mona Kuhn, and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. It lyrically reconsiders the realms of space and time within the architectural elements of the Schindler House, built by Austrian architect Rudolph M.
Schindler in 1922, in Los Angeles.

Doug Nitz is professor and chair in the Department of Cognitive Science. His current research concerns how neural signals in cortex, subiculum, and hippocampus together form a distributed ‘cognitive map’ of location in the environment and the structure of available pathways within it. His background is in systems neuroscience as also applied to the problem of the control of rapid eye movement sleep, episodic memory, and motor control. Nitz teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in systems neuroscience, the neurophysiology of attention, and the neurophysiology of space and time perception. He has enjoyed working with 100’s of undergraduate research interns, four postdoctoral researchers, and has been mentor to 5 PhD students.

Prior to joining UCSD, Nitz was a senior fellow of the Neurosciences Institute where he advanced new ways to study the function of the posterior parietal cortex in understanding route spaces and discovered gamma-frequency clock-like pacing of neural activity in the cerebellum of behaving animals. Nitz finished his PhD at UCLA in 1995 studying brainstem mechanisms for sleep. He then spent 3 years at the University of Arizona as a post-doctoral researcher, changing directions from the study of sleep to that of spatial cognition.

Eduardo R. Macagno is a neuroscientist and Distinguished Professor at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), where he was recruited as the Founding Dean of the Division of Biological Sciences in 2001. He earned his Ph.D. degree in Physics at Columbia University, but subsequently trained in neuroscience as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University, and as a student at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.  He joined the faculty of the Columbia Department of Biological Sciences in 1973, served as chair of this department in 1990-1993, and in 1993 was appointed as Dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.  

Beginning at Columbia and until recently at UCSD, his laboratory focused on the study of fundamental aspects of neural development, including the genesis of neuronal arbors, the innervation of target organs, and the formation of specific synaptic circuits.  Since 2003, he has been involved in the development of an interface between Neuroscience and Architecture through his engagement with the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), as a continuing member of its Board of Directors and President during 2010 and 2011.  

He has also contributed to developing a curriculum for training in this area through teaching courses at UCSD on “Brains and Buildings” and at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design on “Neuroscience for Architecture,” with Professors Gil Cooke and Kris Mun.

His recent and current collaborative research projects employ biometric devices and Virtual Reality environments to study the interaction of normal and neurologically impaired subjects with the built environment, particularly in the areas of navigation, wayfinding and spatial memory.

Galen Cranz is a designer, a consultant, and a Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught social and cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, and established the field of Body Conscious Design, which she taught for 30 years.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique mid-career in New York. Cranz has lectured widely on her perspective on Body Conscious Design and taught her unique approach at craft schools in the US and abroad. Her
research on the chair has attracted print and media attention nationally and internationally. The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Norton 1998) received a 2004 Achievement Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

As a designer she has been part of significant park design competition teams for Spectacle Island, Boston Inner Harbor; Olympia Fields, Chicago; Tschumi’s Parc de LaVillette in Paris, and lead designer for and winner of the St. Paul Cityscape competition. She holds two US patents for body-conscious bathtub and chair designs. In 2005-2007 she designed and built a residence for the elderly following universal design principles.

Jeff Malpas is an Australian philosopher and is currently Emeritus Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania in Hobart and Distinguished Visiting Professor at LaTrobe University in Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Association of von Humboldt Fellows. Originally trained in philosophy and history at the Australian National University and the University of Auckland, his work has expanded over the last forty years to engage with a wide range of topics and disciplines, not only architecture, but also visual art, geography, literature, medicine, music, politics, sociology, and urban planning. He has worked with architects and designers at several universities in Australia and around the world, and was previously adjunct professor in architecture and design at RMIT University in Melbourne and was also attached to the School of Architecture and Design at the University of Tasmania.

At the centre of much of his work is a concern with questions of place and space (an obvious point of contact with architecture), as well as set of related issues concerning self, language, and the ethical. His approach is one that he describes as ‘topological’ or ‘topographic’ in character and is also heavily influenced by twentieth-century hermeneutical thinking. He is the author or editor of some 30 books, and has published over 150 articles in scholarly books and journals. Among his best-known works is Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Routledge, 2018), described by Alberto Pérez-Gómez of McGill University as “a crucial contribution to our understanding of the deep connections between place and all things human. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, Place and Experience offers valuable lessons for architects, urban and environmental designers, and all those willing to challenge the seeming inevitability of homogeneous space and placelessness brought about by our technological civilization’. His most recent publication is Rethinking Dwelling: Heidegger, Place, Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Juan López Vergara Newton studied Architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente (ITESO) in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he has taught different architectural courses for eleven years. He has participated in numerous architecture exhibitions and has collaborated as curator in art shows in various museums and galleries. Since 2010, he has been invited to impart lectures and seminars in different cultural institutions such as Centro para la Cultura Arquitectónica y Urbana and Foro de Arquitectura (Guadalajara) and Casa de Arquitectura (Querétaro, Mexico).

Juan has built a number of private and public buildings. One of his built works (Rehabilitación de imagen urbana de la calle López Cotilla) received a distinction at the X Bienal de Arquitectura Jalisciense (2017). And the project Rehabilitación del Parque de las Estrellas (rehabilitation of the park and the chapel designed by Luis Barragán, in collaboration with Sergio Ortiz) received the XVI Premio de Arquitectura Jalisco (2018). Over the years, he has contributed to different magazines and books. In 2022 he has published two books with his colleague, the architect Sergio Ortiz: Una leve exageración (The slightest exaggeration) and Oraciones sobre la casa y otras oraciones (translation of John Hejduk’s poem Sentences on the House and other Sentences).

He is currently writing the dissertation to obtain a Master Degree in Philosophy. The focus of his research is the relationship between Architecture and Poetry, particularly the diverse poetic aspects of dwelling.

Karina Lozano is an architect and design consultant, based in Monterrey, Mexico. She graduated from UANL in 1999 and is certified in Neuroscience, Architecture, and Urbanism at Newschool of Architecture and Design. Karina spent some years in asian countries and did apprenticeships of design in Malaysia and China, resulting in a respectful and multi-cultural understanding of the interrelations among human beings and environment, that fueled a curiosity still present today.

She has worked since 2001 in her firm Arquitectura Entorno Energía, which aims to integrate a personalized, humanistic, evidence-based approach in every project. She has been invited to speak in Mexico, US, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and China. 

In the national scene she has coordinated forums to encourage evidencebased urban design policies with the participation of the mayor, the coordinator of the national senate in housing, the state senator in urbanism, neuroscientists, architects and urban planners. She is currently involved in an initiative aligned to these goals with the government of Nuevo León, where she lives. She co-created the Institute of Neuroscience for Architecture and Design in Mexico, INPAD. Karina has been a regular contributor for the last 20 years in the Real Estate section of Reforma, the main newspaper in Mexico.

Kate Jeffery is a medically qualified neuroscientist researching the activity of cells in the brain that form the core of a place-knowledge system used for both navigation and memory. She is particularly interested in how the brain represents complexly structured space, with a focus on two main issues: three dimensional space, and the internal “sense of direction.” Recently she has been linking her research to the human experience of space, via collaborations with architects.

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She heads the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow, and is co-director of the electrophysiology company Axona Ltd, which makes high-density recording systems for behavioural neuroscientists.

She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and the Royal Institute of Navigation.

Kurt Hunker is Chief Design Officer at Davy Architecture in San Diego, California. In this role he
is involved in all aspects of practice leadership, from firm-wide design direction to business and
project development to staff mentorship. He has worked on projects across the United States at
all scales and in a wide range of typologies. Many have received design awards from the
American Institute of Architects (AIA) and other organizations and have been published in state,
regional and national periodicals. He is a licensed architect in California and an NCARB
certificate holder.

Hunker is Professor Emeritus of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, where he also
served as Graduate Program Chair, Dean and Provost in his 32 years of award-winning
teaching. Numerous former students have gone on to achieve professional and academic
success in their own right. In 2013 he was elevated to Fellowship in the AIA for his contributions
to architectural education. Currently Hunker is a member of the Board of Directors and Vice
President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, a world-wide advocacy group for
the promotion and application of brain research towards improving architectural design.

Kurt Hunker has been a guest lecturer for local and regional organizations, and has presented
papers at international conferences in Los Angeles, London, Vienna, Moscow and Jyvaskyla,
Finland, among others. Topics have ranged from the literature of architectural criticism to the
phenomenon of "spectacle" in contemporary high-rise building to the work of the great Finnish
architect Alvar Aalto. He received a Master of Architecture degree with Faculty Commendation
from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and a B.S. in Architecture from the
Ohio State University.

Luis Othón Villegas-Solis is an award-winning designer and architect. He received a Master's Degree in Design Studies from Harvard University in 2003 and a degree in Architecture from Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in 1997. He is the founder of LVS Architecture, a firm that explores the connections between behavioral psychology and built spaces. His firm aims to transform sensory experiences in users through design and architecture. Luis Othón has been a guest speaker at several national and international universities such as the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, Harvard University, School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute. In 2021 he was selected to present his research work on a Neuroarchitectural Interpretation System at the Neuroscience and Architecture Symposium of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the ANFA Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in La Jolla, California. Luis Othón has been a teaching assistant for Paola Antonelli. He researched and contributed to the exhibitions: Design and The Elastic Mind and Safe: Design Takes on Risk at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the beginning of his career, Luis Othón worked for Enrique Norten Architects in New York and Rockwell Group, one of the leading experience design firms in the United States. He participated with Enrique Norten and artist Lawrence Weiner at the Snow Show in Finland. 

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He is the former director of the School of Architecture and Interiors at CEDIM Monterrey, Mexico. Luis has made written contributions to various publications, websites, and magazines such as The Architects Newspaper in New York, Connections 360, 10Deco, CoolhunterMX, Mexico Design, and BLINK. Luis Othón is also the founder of Design, Belly, and Brain, a lab of ideas exploring and investigating the intersection between design and brain and architecture perception and human behavior. Mr. Villegas collaborated with Dr. Michael Arbib, and Meredith Banasiak in a chapter called "Systems of Systems: Architectural Atmosphere, Neuromorphic Architecture, and the Well-Being of Humans and Ecospheres" for Mitra Kanaani's forthcoming Book The Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking: Healthful Ecotopian Visions for Architecture and Urbanism. His latest project is the INPAD Institute of Neurosciences for Architecture and Design co-creation, where research in neuroscience and cognitive science is promoted to inform architecture and design.

Mark Alan Hewitt, FAIA, is an architect, historian, and preservationist practicing in the New York area. Educated at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught at leading schools of architecture throughout the U.S., including Rice, Columbia, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His design practice focuses on architectural conservation, history of the built environment, adaptive reuse, and traditional design for residential and institutional clients. He is active as an advocate for sustainable design, historic preservation, social justice, and housing equity for all humans. 

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Hewitt is the author of seven books and dozens of articles on architectural history, theory, and practice. He has published extensively on American architecture of the Progressive era, and has written numerous biographies of American architects. His latest book, Draw In Order to See, is the first to trace the history of architectural design using cognitive neuroscience and embodiment as a basis for analysis. 

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He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a recipient of the Arthur Ross Award for publishing on classical architecture, and a former NEH Winterthur Fellow. He has also won design awards for projects ranging from single family houses to churches. He continues to do research bridging the gap between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities as a cultural historian and critic.

Sarah Robinson is an architect, writer and educator whose practice is based in Pavia, Italy. Her writing and research is concerned with the many ways that the built environment shapes body, mind and culture. Her books, Nesting: Body, Dwelling Mind (William Stout, 2011), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design with Juhani Pallasmaa (MIT, 2015) and Architecture is a Verb, (Routledge, 2021) are among the first works to engage the dialogue between architecture and the cognitive sciences.

Holding degrees in both philosophy and architecture, she was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture board of governors.

She is Adjunct Professor in Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and she is a member of the scientific board of NAAD at IUAV, Venice. 

Dr. Sergei Gepshtein is a Scientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. He works in the areas of perceptual psychology, systems neuroscience and computational neuroscience. His research interests include perception of depth and movement, perceptual organization, planning of multistep actions, and dynamics of cortical neural networks. 

At the Salk Institute, he is a member of the Center for the Neurobiology of Vision and Director of Collaboratory for Adaptive Sensory Technologies, which he founded with the goal to translate results of basic science toward applications ranging from architectural and urban design to forensic science. At the University of Southern California, he directs the Center for Spatial Perception & Concrete Experience – a platform for investigating spatial experience as a natural narrative process. His work has been supported by grants and awards from the National Eye Institute, the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, Swartz Foundation for Theoretical Neuroscience, and National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan.

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He is a founding member of the 5D | World Building Institute, an inaugural member of the Freeman Design Leadership Council, and an inaugural recipient of the Harold Hay Award from the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). In 2016 he joined the Board of Directors of ANFA to facilitate mutual understanding of science and design professionals and to help build the foundation for a new discipline of design enlightened by results of systematic empirical inquiry.

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He has developed a curriculum bridging concepts of space developed by different disciplines in science and design. He used this curriculum to teach undergraduate and graduate courses at the University of Southern California and at NewSchool of Architecture and Design.

Tatiana Berger (M.Arch, Princeton University, B.A. in Arch., UC Berkeley) is an architect, urban designer and educator. She has worked for over 30 years in the U.S., Portugal, Spain and Austria. Her built works, collaborations and community plans were published in international periodicals and presented in exhibitions in Europe and U.S.  Berger worked with Richard Meier in New York,  was Director of the Sochi Olympics 2014 project for ILF Engineers and project architect for Baumschlager-Eberle in Bregenz, Austria. From 1997-2004 she worked as project architect and manager in the office of Alvaro Siza in Porto. Berger's built work, designed in collaboration with architects named above, is found in Porto, Lisbon and Viana do Castelo in Portugal, and also in Austria, the Netherlands, China, Russia and the U.S. In addition to architecture, her experience in professional practice includes landscape design and urban planning, furniture/product design, and construction administration.     ​

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Berger is Founder of Moving Boundaries Collaborative, which provides educational services and design/consulting services. She is guest lecturer at NAAD in Venice, ETH Zurich, NeuroArq Brazil, NAD Chile, and Artclever. She was Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego and Professor of Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. A member of the Advisory Council of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), she developed a new curriculum in architectural theory and studio with a focus on ANFA themes as faculty in the pioneering Neuroscience for Architecture Program at NewSchool. In her role as Liaison for Education and curator of lecture series and symposia, she leads the ANFA Center for Education (ACE), an international forum for educators dedicated to reimagining design education. ​

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​She is co-founder of the Compostela Institute, a laboratory for research and education in environmental design, providing courses and workshops since 2010 in anthropology, cultural studies and building crafts in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She has lectured internationally on topics in architectural theory, urbanism and health, regionalism, and transdisciplinary design education. She is increasingly involved in research in dynamic sensory experience of the built environment informed by knowledge from the human sciences. 

Tiziana Proietti, Ph.D., is an architect, educator and researcher. She is Assistant Professor at the C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma with joint appointments in the Departments of Architecture and Interior Design. She earned her doctorate from the Department of Architecture DiaP of the University of Rome Sapienza (Italy) in 2013 and conducted her doctoral research in collaboration with the University of Technology TUDelft (Netherlands), where she worked as visiting Ph.D researcher.

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The driving force behind her work is the design of spaces that resonate with human perceptive and sensorial aptitudes. Over the years, she has cultivated drawing as a daily practice to aid in exploring these research topics. Like written essays, she uses drawings as tools to disseminate her ideas and allow thoughts to germinate.

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Her practice is infused with a great zeal and interest in design for senses that connect architecture with neuroscience, the anthropology of senses, phenomenology, and cognitive psychology. Passionate about design, she looks at architecture as an enlarged family of objects and expressions of human making meant to enrich human daily life while nurturing the senses, body and mind.

Dr. Thomas D. Albright is Professor and Conrad T. Prebys Chair at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, where he is Director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Vision and Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences at the University of California, San Diego. He specializes in the neural basis of visual perception, memory and visually guided behavior.

He seeks to understand how visual perception is affected by attention, behavioral goals, and memories of previous experiences. An important goal of this work is the development of therapies for blindness and perceptual impairments resulting from disease, trauma or developmental disorders of the brain. A second aim of his work is to use our growing knowledge of brain, perception and memory to inform design in architecture and the arts, and to leverage societal decisions and public policy.

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He received a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and an associate of the Neuroscience Research Program. He is past-president of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (2012-2014), a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Science, Technology, and Law, and a member of the U.S. National Commission on Forensic Science.

Vittorio Gallese, MD, studied medicine at the University of Parma, Parma, Italy, and was awarded a degree in Neurology in 1990. He is a Full Professor of Psychobiology Dept. of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Parma, Honorary Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study of the University of London, UK and Adjunct Senior Research Scholar at the Dept. of Art History and Archeology, Columbia University, New York, USA. He is coordinator of the PhD Program in Neuroscience and Director of the Doctoral School of Medicine of the University of Parma. As a cognitive neuroscientist, his research focuses on the relationship between the sensory-motor system and cognition, both in non-human primates and humans using a variety of neurophysiological and functional neuroimaging techniques applied to the study of intersubjectivity, empathy, language, mindreading and aesthetics. Among his major contributions is the discovery, together with the colleagues of Parma, of mirror neurons, and the elaboration of a theoretical model of basic aspects of social cognition, Embodied Simulation Theory. 

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Gallese has done research at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, at the Nihon University, Tokyo, Japan, at the University of California at Berkeley and at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain of the Humboldt University of Berlin. He has been George Miller visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley. In 2007 he received together with Giacomo Rizzolatti and Leonardo Fogassi the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology, for the discovery of mirror neurons. He received the Doctor Honoris Causa from the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium in 2009. He received the Arnold Pfeffer Prize for Neuropsychoanalysis from the International Society of Neuropsychoanalysis, New York, U.S.A in 2010, the Musatti Prize from the Italian Psychoanalytic Society in 2013, the Kosmos Fellowship from the Berlin School of Mind and Brain in 2014, the Einstein Fellowship for 2016-2020, and the Alexander von Humboldt Forschung Preis in 2019. Gallese has published over 300 papers in international peer-reviewed journals and edited books and three books.

Johanna Enger holds a position as assistant professor and researcher in lighting design at Konstfack - University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. At Konstfack she heads a workshop called the Perception Studio wich offers courses and tutoring to design and craft students at all levels.
With a background in industrial design and a MSc degree in Lighting Design she has dedicated over 15 years striving to bridge design practice and research in the combined knowledge area of light, colour, visual perception and spatial experience. Her experience spans from lighting design and light art practice, presidency of the jury of the Swedish Lighting Award to PhD studies in Environmental Psychology to the current position as teacher as well as research leader for the interdisciplinary research project Perceptual Metrics for lighting design.