Arianna Salazar Miranda

She is a Ph.D. student at MIT interested in cities. She studies the effect that the physical environment has on people. In particular, her research focuses on how the form of cities and buildings shape behavior, social interactions, and people’s access to economic and social opportunity. She studies these topics primarily through the use of spatial techniques of analysis on large datasets gathered from social media or collected by sensors and remote sensing.

Before her Ph.D., she completed a Master of City Planning degree at MIT and was awarded the Outstanding Master Thesis Prize for the 2016/17 academic year. Her thesis analyzed the relationship between urban form and segregation. Recently, she co-founded Bitsence, a startup that develops technology to understand human behavior and measure the impact of urban interventions. For this initiative, she was named one of the Innovators Under 35 by the MIT Technology Review in Latin America.

She is a researcher at Senseable City Lab and the Urban Economics Lab at MIT.