Travel Grant Recipients
Lizzie Yarina
- PhD candidate
- 2023 J-WAFS Travel Grantee
- Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Lizzie Yarina is a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and a research fellow at the MIT Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, where her dissertation investigates the spatial politics of climate change adaptation in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta region, an area facing many water challenges. 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 a 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, Lizzie 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, Arch+, and The Plan Journal. She holds a joint Masters in Architecture and Masters of City Planning from MIT, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan.