Gloria Serra CochGlòria Serra Coch is an architect by the Polytechnique School of Catalonia (UPC), Architecture School of Barcelona. During her studies and after graduation, she assisted the research team Architecture, Energy and Environment (AiEM), exploring methods of integrating renewable energies in cities as well as finding ways of measuring the impact of urban morphology in energetic parameters.In 2017, she obtained la Caixa Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies to pursue a MS. in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York. She graduated with a concentration in Urban Analytics and won the Planning Practice Thesis Award, for analyzing the impact of mapping in the historical planning of New York City neighborhoods. At Columbia, she assisted researching the effects of mobility networks in social accessibility, using GIS public data to map individual opportunity based on time-space daily constraints.After graduation, she combined professional practice with academics and research. She started working in the Urban Planning team of CallisonRTKL, where she also got involved with the newly created research division and participated in the first Digital Evolution Lab. At the same time, she also assisted, as adjunct professor, a joint architecture-urban planning studio of Columbia University focused on Puerto Rico’s inner connectivity.
Maria Anna HecherMaria Anna Hecher obtained her PhD degree at the University of Graz, Austria. In her recent research, she investigated regional energy transitions from a socio-technical perspective. She put a special focus on technology adoption decisions to derive strategies and policy recommendations fostering sustainable transitions. Therefore, she pursued an interdisciplinary approach and combined environmental as well as social science methods (i.e. MFA, ABM, LCA, expert interviews, surveys). After her PhD, she had the chance to put her knowledge into practice and managed a three-year programme on regional sustainabiltiy projects in an energy region in Styria, Austria. In cooperation with local decision-makers, public authorities, schools, companies and the local population, she realized projects in the field of renewable energy and sustainable mobility. Recently, she worked as a consultant in an energy agency for and in the city of Graz. She managed projects in the field of e-mobility and spatial energy planning collaborating with public authorities, energy suppliers, city planners and research institutions. Her work in recent years, has mostly been performed in an inter- and transdisciplinary setting integrating knowledge from different scientific disciplines and fields of practice at the interface between research, politics and society.
