 | Sahar Basil Al-Qaisi (Iraq)
Lecturer, Department of Architectural Engineering, Koya University
Sahar Basil Al-Qaisi has been a lecturer in the Department of Architectural Engineering at Koya University, Kurdistan of Iraq since 2008. She received her BSc in architectural engineering (1997) and MSc in urban design (2005) from the University of Technology, Iraq, and her PhD in urban conservation (2011) from the University of Baghdad, Iraq. In 2009 she had a scholarship at the Brandenburg University of Technology, Germany, by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), to participate in a 3-month workshop about the “Urban Development of Baghdad and Further Cities in Iraq.” Her participation in conferences and publications reflects her research interests in conservation, urban design, and architectural history. In her design and conservation classes, she works with her undergraduate students to study and document the neglected cultural features of Koya city and other old Kurdish cities. |
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 | Comfort Badaru (Tanzania)
Co-founder of Anza Magazine
Originally from Uganda, Comfort Badaru currently lives and works in Tanzania. She graduated in 2014 with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Ardhi University, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Badaru is the co-founder and owner of Anza Magazine, East Africa’s first architectural magazine, an initiative she started along with her colleagues at Ardhi University. The magazine is published biannually and is now in its fifth edition. She has served as the publication’s managing editor since October 2011 and now serves as one of the directors and shareholders. Badaru was one of the founding members of the successful project Dar es Salaam Centre for Architectural Heritage (DARCH). Having received support from the EU, the project is now incorporated as a non-profit organization. A keystone project, refurbishment of the “Old Boma,” the oldest known building on the city’s waterfront, is now underway. She continues to be engaged with DARCH as a board member and advisor. |
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 | Helena Bender (Brazil)
Doctoral Candidate, Postgraduate Program in Architecture, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
Helena Bender is a doctoral candidate at the Postgraduate Program in Architecture of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and a member of Docomomo Brasil, Rio Grande do Sul Chapter. She is also a member of the research group “Studies in Latin American Modern Architecture.” Her research focuses on the urban tissue devised by postwar Latin American modern architecture and on topics dealing with the history of modern architecture, the modern city, open space and modern housing. Bender has published papers and participated in national and international conferences on these subjects. In 2014, she was awarded the Best Postgraduate Planning History Paper Prize at the 16th International Planning History Society Conference and received a paper distinction in the Brazilian “XIII Seminar on Urban and City History.” |
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 | Kamalika Bose (India)
Urban Conservationist, Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI)
Kamalika Bose is an urban conservationist with 10 years of experience in heritage-oriented planning and advocacy, design education and research. She is a Fulbright Scholar, and was formerly an assistant professor at CEPT University, Ahmedabad. She obtained a Master in Historic Preservation Planning from Cornell University. Bose has gained international work experience in areas of neighborhood preservation and cultural heritage through positions at the Historic Districts Council and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, both in New York. She has authored three books, collaborated on numerous research projects and presented her work at several national and international conferences. Her research focuses on the revitalization of urban heritage in India, through tools of economic incentivization, community participation and regulatory frameworks. Her recent work focuses on Chinese and Jain heritage in Bengal. She is currently based at the Urban Design Research Institute (UDRI) in Mumbai. |
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 | Fadila Kettaf (Algeria)
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, University of Sciences and Technology of Mohamed Boudiaf (USTO-MB)
Fadila Kettaf is a lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the University of Sciences and Technology of Mohamed Boudiaf (USTO-MB) (Oran, Algeria) and head of its master’s program in architecture and urban design. She is an associate member of the research unit UMR GRED-IRD of the University of Montpellier 3 (France). Her teaching and research focus on a multidisciplinary approach that crosses public space, urban form and architecture in a global vision of urban space. They address reflections on inherited city, with a critical and prospective view. Kettaf received a BA in architecture from the University of Sciences and Technology Mohamed Boudiaf (USTO-MB) in 1979, an MPhil in architecture and building engineering from Bath University (England) in 1986 and a PhD in geography and town planning from the University Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 (France) in 2013. She is qualified from CNU France section 24: urbanism and town planning. |
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 | Asmaa Ibrahim (Egypt)
Associate Professor, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University
Asmaa Ibrahim is an associate professor at the Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, and a visiting associate professor at the AET program, Cairo University, the AUC, the MSA, and MTI Universities. She is a main coordinator in the Double Master Program with Cottbus University in Germany. Her research interest is in the field of strategic urban planning in relation to economic and environmental concerns. She currently participates in the Strategic Urban Planning for Small Cities Project and previously worked as a consultant in the Strategic National Development Support Project led by the UN Habitat. Ibrahim has extensive expertise in the field of urban planning and urban design with a focus on the new cities’ landscape rehabilitation, and has international publications in this field. She has been the Cairo University representative in the Millennium Development Goals Awareness Project in cooperation with the UNDP, is a member of UMAR (Union of Mediterranean Architects), and the Egyptian Representative of ASYA MED. |
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 | A. K. Kasthurba (India)
Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, National Institute of Technology Calicut
A. K. Kasthurba has taught architecture at the National Institute of Technology Calicut since 1989 and served as head of the Department of Architecture there from 2011–2013. She is a certified registered architect by the Council of Architecture and a life member of the Indian Institute of Architecture (IIA), Indian Society for Technical Education (ISTE), Indian Association for the Study of Cultural Property in India (IASC) and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). Kasthurba earned a PhD in building technology from IIT Madras India in 2006 and a BArch from the College of Engineering, University of Kerala Trivandrum, India, in 1998. She served as a visiting research fellow at the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2014, and in 2013 she visited 15 top technical universities in the USA as a Fulbright Research Fellow. |
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 | Yifei Liu (China)
Assistant Professor, School of Landscape, Beijing Forestry University
After earning her bachelor’s degree in architecture at Tsinghua University, Yifei Liu went on to pursue a PhD degree in cultural heritage conservation. She has participated in various conservation and research projects at the THU-National Heritage Center, studied as a visiting scholar at Cardiff University in UK, and in 2014 she completed her thesis on “Historic Urban Landscape.” Liu is an assistant professor in the City Planning Department at the School of Landscape, Beijing Forestry University, where she teaches urban geography, urban landscape planning and design, urban planning theories, and an urban design studio. Her current research interests include cultural heritage conservation, historic city studies, cultural landscape, historic urban landscape, urban planning and design. She has published more than 10 papers and has led an ongoing research project entitled "Strategy Study on the Management of Change in Historic Cities Based on the Theory of Historic Urban Landscape." |
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 | Fernando Martínez Nespral (Argentina)
Professor, University of Buenos Aires
Fernando Martínez Nespral is an architect and specialist in the history and criticism of architecture and urbanism. He graduated from the School of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina, and holds a PhD in history from the University Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires. He completed his post-doc studies at the National University of Córdoba, Argentina. Nespral teaches courses in Islamic and Mudejar architecture, contemporary architecture and architectural history at the University of Buenos Aires, and teaches postgraduate courses at the National University of Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires. His research focus is Islamic architecture and its connections with the Hispanic American World from the Middle Ages to the present. |
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 | Julia Miranda Aloise (Brazil)
Architect and Urban Planner
Julia Miranda Aloise received her MArch from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and her MA in conservation and restoration of monuments and historic sites from the Federal University of Bahia. Her research focused on colonial Brazilian vernacular architecture and urban planning of historic city centers, specifically the town center of Mostardas, a historic Azorean town in Southern Brazil. As an undergraduate she studied the history of architecture and heritage studies, complemented by an experience in Turin, Italy, where she studied themes concerned with architectural and urban heritage. She has experience developing city plans through simulations, geoprocessing and research, while working with preservation guidelines for historic sites in small towns. In the future, she plans to combine heritage and urban planning studies, developing alternatives for guaranteeing a successful relationship between preservation and city dynamics in Brazil. |
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 | Noëleen Murray (South Africa)
Director, Wits City Institute, University of the Witwatersrand
Noëleen Murray is the director of the Wits City Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, and holds the Andrew. W. Mellon Chair in Critical Architecture and Urbanism. Her publications include Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City (Routledge, Architext Series, 2007) and Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and the Unmaking of Apartheid’s Legacy (2012). Her most recent book, Hostels, Homes, Museum: Memorializing Migrant Labour Pasts in Lwandle, South Africa (2014), was awarded the Michael M. Ames Award for Innovative Museum Anthropology by the Council for Museum Anthropology of the American Association of Anthropologists. It gives an account of the making of a small museum in the space once planned as a migrant labor compound. Murray’s work offers a reading of architecture under and after apartheid. Her current projects in Johannesburg further explore her interest in architectural history as well as her passion for gathering spatial archives. |
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 | Changxue Shu (China)
Research Fellow, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge
Changxue Shu is a research fellow in the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, UK. She holds a PhD in conservation of architectural heritage from the Polytechnic of Milan. Her research focuses on the multicultural interactions between materiality, practicality, and representation in the making of architecture based on three dependent frameworks: history of science and technology, architectural heritage and historical urban landscapes. As an architect and urbanist she has indulged her love of architecture through travelling, surveying, designing and planning. Her present focus is the changes in brickmaking technology in modern China, in collaboration with the lab of CNR-ICVBC (Institute for the Conservation and Valorization of Cultural Heritage) in Florence. |
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 | Ivan Strelbitsky (Russia)
Chief Engineer, Center of Traditional Russian Culture “Preobrazhenskoe”
Ivan Strelbitsky graduated from the Moscow Institute for Land Reclamation in 1975 with a degree in hydrotechnical structures. After working on several dams and canals in the southern USSR, he decided his vocation was more to conserve nature then to change it. In 1980 he took part in a restoration workshop in which he could implement his background as a structural engineer in conservation and restoration of historic structures throughout Russia, including monasteries, fortresses, mansions and churches. Strelbitsky has taken conservation courses in Moscow and has participated in ICCROM programs in Norway and Rome. For over 10 years, he has worked as a freelance conservation consultant and has taken part in various projects throughout Russia as well as India. He lectures at the Institute of Art Restoration. |
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 | Shirley Surya (Hong Kong)
Associate Curator, Design and Architecture, M+, Hong Kong
As part of building the permanent collection at M+, Hong Kong’s new museum for visual culture, Shirley Surya has researched and acquired works and materials representing the multiple histories and modernities in the development of post-war design and architectural developments in Hong Kong, greater China and Southeast Asia, through an inter-disciplinary, global design, and transnational framework. She has co-organized exhibitions including Building M+: The Museum & Architecture Collection and Mobile M+: NEONSIGNS.HK. Prior to M+, she was a curatorial researcher-writer for the exhibition Yung Ho Chang & FCJZ: Material-ism and the publication of architect Yung Ho Chang’s drawings, Yung Ho Chang Draws. She has contributed writings to Design and Culture, Singapore Architect, A+U and the upcoming Encyclopedia of Asian Design. Surya received her BA in media studies at UC Berkeley and her MA in history of design, focusing on architecture in post-revolutionary China, from London’s Royal College of Art/Victoria and Albert Museum. |
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 | Huda Tayob (South Africa)
PhD Candidate, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
Huda Tayob is currently a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. She received a master’s degree in architecture (with distinction) from the University of Cape Town and subsequently worked in architectural practices prior to starting her PhD. Her doctoral research looks into the “hidden architectures” of Cape Town through the markets and trading spaces of African immigrants in the city since the 1990s. Her research draws on postcolonial theories, the politics of invisibility, and the notion of everyday architectures in order to investigate African markets, pan-African shopping arcades and new immigrant enclaves in Cape Town. Her research focuses on how these everyday architectures are rendered invisible through spatial and political processes within the city, country and continent, and employs drawing as a research tool. Her PhD research is funded by the Commonwealth Scholarships Commission with initial support from the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust and Scarbrow Trust. |