Hi, I’m Valeria and I use she/her/hers pronouns. I am a designer who aspires to leverage nuance and research to inform imaginative design as a foundation for social and environmental justice.

Through my studies and research, I have explored different ways of creating equity in cities, providing opportunities for communities with less access, and understanding the causes and consequences of forced migration. I completed my senior thesis on the conditions of control and precarity in the Dadaab refugee camp complex. I received my B.S. in Architecture from Yale college in May of 2020.

My engineering projects have taught me to critically analyze designs and how to leverage data in optimizing designs. They have allowed me to create solutions to meet specific goals but also to think more broadly about the context of these designs—how might they be conceptualized, accessed, and used in settings beyond the makerspace?

I hope to use my studies in architecture (with a concentration in urban studies) and mechanical engineering to become a socially and environmentally responsible designer who centers the “problem” without causing new ones.