Andrea Chiba is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science and in the Program for Neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Chiba earned her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley and subsequently taught high school math. She earned her Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of Utah. She is Co-Director and the founding Science Director of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF Science of Learning Center. The Center research is focused on the importance of time and timing in various aspects of learning, from the level of the synapse to social interactions. Chiba is involved in many Center projects that allow cross-species comparisons of learning and memory, bridging from rodent to human. 

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Dr. Chiba’s Laboratory is focused on gaining an understanding of the neural systems and principles underlying aspects of learning, memory, affect, and attention, with an emphasis on neural plasticity. Work in her laboratory is highly interdisciplinary, using a variety of neurobiological, neurochemical, neurophysiology, computational, robotic, and behavioral techniques.

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Dr. Chiba has authored dozens of papers and other publications and has organized and participated in international workshops to help educators and policy-makers understand how the science of learning provides a strong foundation for educational excellence.

Andréa de Paiva is a Master of Arts (Middlesex University, London) and architect (University of São Paulo) from Brazil. In her work, she seeks to bridge research, education and design. Her research interests involve the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science, applied to architecture and urbanism in order to understand how the physical environment affects individuals and society. Her research included such topics as short- and long-term effects of the physical environment, environmental enrichment and brain plasticity, how space affects memorization of experience, cognitive restoration and multi-sensory experience of places.

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Andréa is the co-author of the book Triuno: Neuro-business and Quality of Life. She is the creator of NeuroAU (neuroau.com), which is an online space for discussion and dissemination of knowledge about links between cognitive science, architecture and design. NeuroAU has more than 29K followers on Instagram (@neuro_au) and it has numerous articles  published about intersections of cognitive science and architecture, in English and Portuguese. The site also hosts an online courses on these topics, with students coming from more than 26 different countries.

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Andréa works as a professor of neuroscience for architecture in two Brazilian universities: Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) and Faculdade Armando Álvares Penteado (FAAP). At FAAP, she has created a course Neuroscience Applied to Environments and Creation, which will have completed its ninth cohort by the end of 2021.

She is a member of ACE (ANFA Centre for Education ) and she was invited to speak at Dubai Institute of Design and Innovation; Varna Free University (Bulgaria), the Institute for Challenging Disorganization in the US, DP Architects London, SECOVI-SP and SESC-SP in Brazil.

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Andréa also serves as a consultant on neuroscience for architecture, having consulted at Athié Wohnrath (one of the most successful architecture offices in Brazil, according to Forbes, 2016), where she was involved in projects about schools and workplaces. She was a consultant at FGV (the best think tank in Latin America, according to the Global Go To Think Tanks Index, 2020). 

David Dorenbaum, MD (México, 1956), is a psychoanalyst, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Lacan Clinical Forum at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. His essays
appear in various publications that have resulted from collaborations with artists and museums. He is a regular contributor to the newspaper El País. His most recent essay appears in the book Kings Road Mona Kuhn (Steidl, 2021).

This project is the result of a collaboration with photographer Mona Kuhn, and the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. It lyrically reconsiders the realms of space and time within the architectural elements of the Schindler House, built by Austrian architect Rudolph M.
Schindler in 1922, in Los Angeles.

Dr. Francesca Ferroni is an accomplished neurobiologist currently affiliated with the University of Parma, Italy. She undertakes research in intricate areas such as the bodily self, schizophrenia, multisensory integration, and peripersonal space. Dr.Ferroni is recognized for her significant contributions to Cognitive Neuroscience and Neurobiology. In her current role as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Parma, Dr. Ferroni's insightful work has garnered global recognition, evidenced by over 309 citations in scholarly publications. This points to the far-reaching impact and ongoing relevance of her research within the scientific community. Dr. Ferroni has an extensive portfolio of 24 scholarly publications, a testament to her profound understanding of her field and her consistent commitment to furthering knowledge within it. These works provide a comprehensive overview of her academic exploration, reaffirming her position as a key contributor to the field of neurobiology.

Galen Cranz is a designer, a consultant, and a Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught social and cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, and established the field of Body Conscious Design, which she taught for 30 years.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique mid-career in New York. Cranz has lectured widely on her perspective on Body Conscious Design and taught her unique approach at craft schools in the US and abroad. Her
research on the chair has attracted print and media attention nationally and internationally. The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Norton 1998) received a 2004 Achievement Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

As a designer she has been part of significant park design competition teams for Spectacle Island, Boston Inner Harbor; Olympia Fields, Chicago; Tschumi’s Parc de LaVillette in Paris, and lead designer for and winner of the St. Paul Cityscape competition. She holds two US patents for body-conscious bathtub and chair designs. In 2005-2007 she designed and built a residence for the elderly following universal design principles.

Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology of the University of Exeter (UK). She was educated in Italy and the UK, and after getting a DPhil from Sussex in 2004, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of York (Canada),

Trento (Italy), and Harvard. Since 2007 she has worked and lived in Exeter, temporarily visiting various research centers in Europe, Australia, and Asia. 

At Exeter she is also member of EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences), where she leads the Mind, Body, and Culture research cluster. She is further affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, where since 2021 she has been Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Health Sciences and collaborates with its research cluster on Movement, Culture, and Society.

Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science (especially embodied and situated cognition), philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and material culture studies. She has worked in particular on the notions of emotion and affectivity, and on their relation to theories of embodiment, enaction, and extended mind. She is author of several articles and chapters in which she argues that, from a dynamical and embodied-mind perspective, cognition and emotion are not separate mental faculties, and rather emotion is a primordial and all-pervasive dimension of the mind.

In 2010-2014 she was Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”, during which she wrote The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014). Since then, she has worked on the notion of “situated affectivity” and is currently writing a second monograph on our affective relation to material objects.

Itai is a practicing architect, researcher, and multidisciplinary artist focusing on the relationship between people and place. He is the Founder of The Centre for Conscious Design, and Director of Hume – a Science-Informed architecture and urban design practice.

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In 2015, Itai founded the Conscious Cities movement; a new field of research and practice for building environments that are aware and responsive, using data analysis, AI, tech, and science-informed design. For his work in advancing changes in the design profession, he was named by Metropolis Magazine as one of 2020's 'Game Changers' in transformative ideas in Health, Social Justice, Technology, and Urbanism.

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Itai carries out thought leadership and advisory roles in a number of other research and policy bodies, contributing to strategies that focus on systems change and the promotion of design as a socially conscious profession.

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His work and writing has been featured internationally and he is a regular speaker at events focused on the built environment and human impact.
 

Luis Othón Villegas-Solis is an award-winning designer and architect. He received a Master's Degree in Design Studies from Harvard University in 2003 and a degree in Architecture from Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara in 1997. He is the founder of LVS Architecture, a firm that explores the connections between behavioral psychology and built spaces. His firm aims to transform sensory experiences in users through design and architecture. Luis Othón has been a guest speaker at several national and international universities such as the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, Harvard University, School of Visual Arts, and Pratt Institute. In 2021 he was selected to present his research work on a Neuroarchitectural Interpretation System at the Neuroscience and Architecture Symposium of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the ANFA Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture in La Jolla, California. Luis Othón has been a teaching assistant for Paola Antonelli. He researched and contributed to the exhibitions: Design and The Elastic Mind and Safe: Design Takes on Risk at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the beginning of his career, Luis Othón worked for Enrique Norten Architects in New York and Rockwell Group, one of the leading experience design firms in the United States. He participated with Enrique Norten and artist Lawrence Weiner at the Snow Show in Finland. 

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He is the former director of the School of Architecture and Interiors at CEDIM Monterrey, Mexico. Luis has made written contributions to various publications, websites, and magazines such as The Architects Newspaper in New York, Connections 360, 10Deco, CoolhunterMX, Mexico Design, and BLINK. Luis Othón is also the founder of Design, Belly, and Brain, a lab of ideas exploring and investigating the intersection between design and brain and architecture perception and human behavior. Mr. Villegas collaborated with Dr. Michael Arbib, and Meredith Banasiak in a chapter called "Systems of Systems: Architectural Atmosphere, Neuromorphic Architecture, and the Well-Being of Humans and Ecospheres" for Mitra Kanaani's forthcoming Book The Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking: Healthful Ecotopian Visions for Architecture and Urbanism. His latest project is the INPAD Institute of Neurosciences for Architecture and Design co-creation, where research in neuroscience and cognitive science is promoted to inform architecture and design.

President of Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design

Mission: Preserve and Use the Neutra Legacy to Promote Creative Research and Design that Benefits People and the Planet.

Dr. Neutra is the last remaining son of Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra. Inspired by his father's 1954 book Survival Through Design, Dr Neutra embarked on a career in medicine and environmental epidemiology and public health.

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Being involved with contentious environmental and occupational health policy discussions taught him that some perfectly valid evidence may be insufficient to guide policy when other ideological or economic interests make that evidence inconvenient to some stakeholders. 

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He continued to be involved with the work and thoughts of his architect father and brother and their faith in a research inspired architecture that serves people and the planet. He has written articles on their ideas and a book "Cheap and Thin: Neutra and Frank Lloyd Wright".
 

Tatiana Berger (Princeton University, UC Berkeley) is an architect, urban designer, entrepreneur, consultant and educator. She has worked for over 35 years in the U.S., Portugal, Spain and Austria. Her built works, collaborations and community plans were published in international periodicals and presented in exhibitions in Europe and U.S.  Berger worked with Richard Meier in New York,  was Director of the Sochi Olympics 2014 project for ILF Engineers and project architect for Baumschlager-Eberle in Bregenz, Austria. From 1997-2004 she worked as project architect and manager in the office of Alvaro Siza in Porto. Berger's built work, designed in collaboration with architects named above, is found in Porto, Lisbon and Viana do Castelo in Portugal, and also in Austria, the Netherlands, China, Russia and the U.S. In addition to architecture, her experience in professional practice includes landscape design and urban planning, furniture/product design, and construction administration.     ​

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Berger is Founder of Moving Boundaries Collaborative, which provides educational services and design/consulting services. She is guest lecturer at NAAD in Venice, ETH Zurich, NeuroArq Brazil, NAD Chile, and the BAC. She was Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego and Professor of Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. A member of the Advisory Council of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), she developed a new curriculum in architectural theory and studio with a focus on ANFA themes as faculty in the pioneering Neuroscience for Architecture Program at NewSchool. In her role as Liaison for Education and curator of lecture series and symposia, she led for three years the ANFA Center for Education (ACE), an international forum for educators dedicated to reimagining design education. ​

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​She is co-founder of the Compostela Institute, a laboratory for research and education in environmental design, providing courses and workshops since 2010 in anthropology, cultural studies and building crafts in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. She has lectured internationally on topics in architectural theory, urbanism and health, regionalism, and transdisciplinary design education. She is increasingly involved in research in dynamic sensory experience of the built environment informed by knowledge from the human sciences. 

Juhani Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and Professor emeritus, Aalto University. Pallasmaa has written and lectured extensively across the world for over 45 years on architecture, the visual arts, environmental phenomenology, and cultural philosophy. 

Among the many academic and civic positions he has held are those of Director of the Museum of Finnish Architecture and head of the Institute of Industrial Arts, Helsinki. He established his own architect's office in 1983 in Helsinki. He has taught architecture at many universities around the world, including Yale University, The Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, the Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin School. Pallasmaa has lectured widely in Europe, North and South America, Africa and Asia.

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Among Pallasmaa’s many books on architectural theory are: “The Eyes of the Skin – Architecture and the Senses” and “The Thinking Hand” as well as “Encounters 1 and 2”. His new book, “Rootedness: Reflections for Young Architects” was published recently by Wiley in London.

Pallasmaa was a member of the jury on the Pritzker Prize Committee for many years. He is a member of the Finnish Association of Architects, an honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and of many other professional organizations.

Kurt Hunker, FAIA is Chief Design Officer at Davy Architecture in San Diego, California. In this role he
is involved in all aspects of practice leadership, from firm-wide design direction to business and
project development to staff mentorship. He has worked on projects across the United States at
all scales and in a wide range of typologies. Many have received design awards from the
American Institute of Architects (AIA) and other organizations and have been published in state,
regional and national periodicals. He is a licensed architect in California and an NCARB
certificate holder.

Hunker is Professor Emeritus of the NewSchool of Architecture and Design, where he also
served as Graduate Program Chair, Dean and Provost in his 32 years of award-winning
teaching. Numerous former students have gone on to achieve professional and academic
success in their own right. In 2013 he was elevated to Fellowship in the AIA for his contributions
to architectural education. Currently Hunker is a member of the Board of Directors and President of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, a world-wide advocacy group for
the promotion and application of brain research towards improving architectural design.

Kurt Hunker has been a guest lecturer for local and regional organizations, and has presented
papers at international conferences in Los Angeles, London, Vienna, Moscow and Jyvaskyla,
Finland, among others. Topics have ranged from the literature of architectural criticism to the
phenomenon of "spectacle" in contemporary high-rise building to the work of the great Finnish
architect Alvar Aalto. He received a Master of Architecture degree with Faculty Commendation
from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and a B.S. in Architecture from the
Ohio State University.

Sarah Robinson is an architect, writer and educator whose practice is based in Pavia, Italy. Her writing and research is concerned with the many ways that the built environment shapes body, mind and culture. Her books, Nesting: Body, Dwelling Mind (William Stout, 2011), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design with Juhani Pallasmaa (MIT, 2015) and Architecture is a Verb, (Routledge, 2021) are among the first works to engage the dialogue between architecture and the cognitive sciences.

Holding degrees in both philosophy and architecture, she was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture board of governors.

She is Adjunct Professor in Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and she is a member of the scientific board of NAAD at IUAV, Venice.