CLASS OF 2019

Gloria Chang

Gloria has had a trajectory spanning from art, to architecture, to societal formation, and believes in the agency of design to shape our environment. Her investigation into the rebuilding of cities post-conflict in an effort to effect increased resistance against potential recurrences was inspired by her time in Rwanda, where she lived as a US Peace Corps volunteer. She is particularly interested in patterns of behavior and theories of spatial organization, at the individual level to the global scale.

The projects she designed and implemented in cooperation with the Ministry of Education and the Ugandan Mentors focused on literacy, gender equality, health, and sexuality, with an emphasis on diverse methodologies for optimal delivery, and included participants in every province. She has also worked at varying types of architectural firms, predominantly in New York City. She received her Bachelor of Architecture and BA in Architecture and Visual and Dramatic Arts (VADA) from Rice University. She is currently a concurrent degree candidate in MDes Risk and Resilience and Master in Architecture II at the GSD.

Mariel Collard

Mariel Collard (MLA1-AP/MDes-R+R) is currently a dual degree student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design working in the intersections between architecture and landscape considering the built and the living environment alike. In her current research on environmental migration and retreat, she uses design as a research and practice tool to engage with vulnerable environments and think critically about resilience. She focuses her work on the Latin American territory, particularly Mexico.

Mariel obtained her Professional Degree in Architecture from Universidad Iberoaméricana, Mexico City and has engaged in academic exchanges with The Aedes Metropolitan Laboratory (Berlin), The École Spéciale d’Architecture (Paris) and The University of Liechtenstein as a fellow of the Cátedra Blanca CEMEX Prize. Prior to her arrival at the GSD, she worked independently and in collaboration with Estudio MMX as an architect.

Natasha Hicks

Natasha Hicks is a graduate student at Harvard Graduate School of Design pursuing a concurrent degree in Urban Planning and Design Studies (Concentration: Risk and Resilience). Natasha received her Bachelor’s degree in Architecture and Art History from Stanford University. Prior to studying at the GSD, Natasha spent two years working in a diverse set of cultural institutions such as the A+D Museum, the J Paul Getty Museum, and the Neue Galerie New York. She also spent two years working as a Junior Architect at Aurelie Paradiso Design in New York City. Passionate about dismantling the symptoms of racial inequity embedded within the built environment, Natasha was the Co-President of the African American Student Union, organizer of the Black in Design Conference, and the GSD student representative on the Presidential Task force for Inclusion and Belonging. She is also a Research Assistant at the Just City Lab at the GSD, led by Toni L. Griffin.

Pablo Izaga González

Pablo holds a Professional Degree in Architecture from University of Seville, Spain. Prior to joining the Harvard GSD, he practiced in offices in Spain, India, and Netherlands (MVRDV). As an independent professional, he has won, along with Adrián Martínez, the 1st Prize ex-aequo in the International Competition for the Restoration of the Clesa Factory, a building by Spanish architect Alejandro de la Sota. His academic grants and awards include Fulbright Scholarship, Real Colegio Harvard Complutense Scholarship, Arquia Grant for Academic Performance, and Government of Spain Research Grant.

Dení López

Dení studied Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where she graduated with merit diploma. During her undergraduate studies, she spent a year in ČVUT, Prague and was part of the first Mexican team to participate in the Solar Decathlon Europe, held in Versailles, France in 2014. Subsequently, she collaborated with firms such as Estudio Lamela and JSa in Mexico City. Recently, she obtained two master’s degrees from Harvard University: the first in Design Studies, with a concentration in Risk and Resilience, and the second in Architecture in Urban Design. During the last stage, her studies were sponsored by the National Autonomous University of México, the Fundación México en Harvard, the National Fund for Culture and Arts, and the National Council of Science and Technology. Moreover, her thesis research was credited with multiple awards and focused on analyzing of the disconnect across scales in disaster response, particularly regarding rubble management in the post-earthquake region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

Susanna Pho

Susanna Pho is a designer and researcher whose work is frequently informed the fact that she hails from Southern California. Her research is focused on the cultural politics of disaster and how structures of inclusion/exclusion are manifested in frameworks for disaster response. She is particularly interested in how dominant and marginalized narratives shape response policy and, in turn, affect community resiliency – especially in non-, peri- and ex- urban contexts where historical growth is less likely to provide a cushion against catastrophe.

Susanna holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley (B.A., Architecture, Minor: Environmental Design in Developing Countries) and MIT (M.Arch). While at MIT she conducted participatory planning research as part of MIT Media Lab’s City Science group and completed a thesis situated in the Mojave Desert exploring themes of suburban identity, trauma, and collective memory-making. Prior to joining the GSD, Susanna practiced as an architectural designer working on housing and civic projects. Concurrently, she has been an active founding member of a design-research-build organization operating in southwestern Tanzania on issues relating to rural design and development since 2013. Her diverse background also includes experience working on cross-disciplinary community outreach, masterplanning, and affordable housing projects in the U.S. and internationally.

Maclean Sarbah

MacLean’s research interest sits at the nexus of Design and the Social Sciences. Migration is central to his research interests; however, exploring these issues through the lenses of displacement and refugee challenges induced by environmental factors such as droughts, floods, natural disasters, etc., as well those engendered by violence emanating from conflicts hold sway. He wants to ascertain how environments produce and are produced by migration and to explore the discourse on risk mitigation at the spatial scales of Ghana and Africa, marrying social science research with design research.

MacLean was a Tata International Social Entrepreneurship Fellow in India. He has also worked in Conflict/Dispute Resolution with the Better Business Bureau, United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and Citigroup.

He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in the Social Sciences from the University of Ghana, an Advanced Post-graduate Certificate in Cooperation and Conflict Resolution from the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution at Columbia University, a Master of Arts in Social-Organizational Psychology from Columbia University, and  a Master of Philosophy in Innovation, Strategy and Organization from the University of Cambridge Judge Business School, England, where he wrote his thesis on “The Role of Emotions and Affect on Technology Adoption.”

Natalie Zongai Wang

Natalie’s research is focused on developing alternative design research methods that are sensitive to transgenerational trauma, inequality, reconciliation and development as a preemptive form of practice. Meanwhile, designing spaces of healing and wellbeing.

Natalie is a strategist and designer by training who has worked several years designing social interventions for non-profits and transnational organizations. Concurrently she has studied psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, divinity, and identity, with themes of trauma, empathy, forgiveness, narcissism and altruism to discover how self awareness affects decision making. Her work has taken her to research in New Orleans to consulting in New York City and strategizing in countries such as India, Brazil, South Africa, and Ecuador. In 2013 she was part of a team that was awarded “Game Changer” by Metropolis Magazine and was a finalist in Fast Company’s Innovation By Design Awards.

She received her Bachelors of Business Administration in Strategic Design and Management from Parsons The New School for Design where her special interest in the ethics of social innovation, designing for complex systemic issues, and the convergence of emotional intelligence and design thinking to promote the sustainable well-being of people, the environment, and the economy began.

Naomi Woods

Naomi comes to the GSD from East Africa, where she has been based for the past eight years, overseeing emergency response, design, and implementation of primary care and community health projects with NGOs and the extractives sector across ten sub-Saharan African countries. Prior to this, Naomi was based in Viet Nam for several years, working with governments in the Mekong Sub-Region on an HIV and migrant labor policy harmonization project. Naomi holds a Master of Public Policy focusing on the social determinants of health related to TB treatment completion in Kenya, and a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Political Science. She is at the GSD in the MDes Risk and Resilience concentration to investigate water and infrastructure in cities in conflict and in arid climates, and to expand her understanding of design thinking, landscape, and the built environment, and their application in addressing humanitarian crisis and recovery.