Gara Villalba Mendez

Gara Villalba is a full professor of the Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her bachelor’s degree is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998), and her PhD from the University of Barcelona (2003), both in chemical engineering. Her research is dedicated to the study and optimization of resource metabolism from a systemic approach based on Industrial Ecology tools such as Material Flow Analysis and Life Cycle Analysis. Recent studies focus on analyzing and optimizing the food-energy-water nexus of urban systems. She was a Marie S. Curie fellow (2015-2018) at UC Merced School of Engineering, during which she led the project URBANCO2FLUX “Quantifying the impact of the urban biosphere on the net flux of CO₂ from cities into the atmosphere.” She was recently awarded an ERC Consolidator Integrated System Analysis of Urban Vegetation and Agriculture (2019-2024), and is a recipient of ICREA Academia 2021. She teaches in the undergraduate program of Chemical Engineering, as well as the Master’s Degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in Environmental, Economic and Social Sustainability (where she coordinates the specialty of Industrial Ecology), and the Master’s Degree of Biological and Environmental engineering.