Elizabeth Yarina

Lizzie Yarina is a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and is pursuing the Advanced Urbanism concentration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, where her dissertation investigates the spatial politics of climate change adaptation in delta regions. 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 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, Yarina 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, The Plan Journal, and Arch+. Yarina holds a joint Masters in Architecture and Masters of City Planning from MIT, and a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan.