Lara Garcia
Lara Garcia who started at Penn State in August 2022 is a Brazilian Landscape Architecture Ph.D. student with a dual degree in Transdisciplinary Research on Environment and Society (TREES) at Penn State University. Her current Ph.D. research focuses on the socio-economic and environmental vulnerabilities to extreme heat events and geospatial analyses applied to design processes. She aims to develop a neighborhood-level heat adaptation framework for Brazilian informal settlements and social housing communities. Lara has diverse training in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning, having earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and urban planning from the University of Brasilia, Brazil (2016), being granted a scholarship to study architectural design during her undergraduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MD), and recently attaining a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Penn State University (2021). During her graduate studies, she supported teaching for various landscape architecture courses, especially the design studios emphasizing GIS (Geographic Information Systems) tools and systems thinking. Other relevant work experiences include collaborating for two terms in 2020 and 2021 as a consulting intern at Esri (Environmental Systems Research Institute), working with the State and Local Government Services team to create the Regional Data Platform (RDP) for The Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). Before committing to her Ph.D. studies, Lara joined, as a landscape designer, the institutional design team at Mahan Rykiel Associates – a landscape architecture, urban design, and planning firm in Baltimore – Maryland. During her doctoral program has served as an instructor for the first-year landscape architecture studio course and collaborated as a research assistant under the supervision of Professor Travis Flohr for a Penn State Institute of Energy and the Environment (IEE) research grant. She also interned at Penn State’s Office of Physical Plant along with the Planning, Design & Properties Team, where she witnessed the progression of projects such as the expansion of Penn State’s Student Farm and the core campus’ sustainable landscapes implementation plan.