Dr Leila Irajifar

Leila is an interdisciplinary academic working at the intersection of urban planning, design and disaster management.

Her research tackles the challenges of operationalising urban resilience, science and technology in DRR, post-disaster reconstruction and her recent research focuses on the applications of complex systems theory in urban resilience planning and developing models to better understand these complexities and interdependencies in the face of climate change and other social and environmental hazards.

Leila holds a bachelor in architecture and a masters in post-disaster reconstruction and she earned her PhD in urban resilience planning from Griffith University in Australia.

She had been involved in UN-Habitat's City Resilience Profiling Program in Barcelona and worked as postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Great Lakes Research at CMU before joining RMIT University. 

Prior to academia, she had several years of professional experience as an architect/planner in public and private practice concerning urban planning and post-disaster reconstruction projects.