Marina Alberti

Marina Alberti is Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. She completed her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Post Doctorate Fellowship at Stanford University. She directs the Urban Ecology Research Laboratory https://urbaneco.washington.edu/wp/ a research team that studies cities as hybrid ecosystems. Alberti is PI of the Research Coordination Network on Urban Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics https://www.urbanecoevo.net/, an international team of scientists studying the effects of urbanization on global evolutionary change. Alberti’s research interests are in urban ecology and eco-evolutionary dynamics. Her studies focus on the interactions between urban patterns and ecosystem function, urban signatures of evolutionary change, and the emergent properties of urban ecosystems that enhance their resilience and transformative capacity. She leads research on urban ecological modeling, scenario planning, and the development of urban ecological metrics to monitor progress and inform policy-making and planning. In her recent book Cities That Think Like Planets (UW Press 2016), Alberti advances a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and link unpredictable dynamics to the potential for socio-ecological innovation.