Gabriella Carolini

Gabriella is an Assistant Professor at MIT, where she sits on the faculty of the International Development Group and is an affiliated member of the Housing, Community, and Economic Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Her research interests center on studying the dynamic relationship between social and fiscal responsibilities in the public sector. More specifically, Gabriella studies policy mobility within the global South and the interplay of internationally celebrated fiscal and administrative reforms with city planning for basic services and accompanying infrastructures, ultimately to understand how public health is shaped in vulnerable urban and peri-urban communities.She is currently working on a book which presents and tests theories of how learning happens among urban development professionals in Mozambique, with a special emphasis on those working in South-South Cooperation projects with Brazil.

Before her appointment at MIT, Gabriella was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers and worked in various capacities with the UN Millennium Project, UNFPA, UN-HABITAT, Rockefeller Foundation, Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia’s Earth Institute, Oxford Analytica and a private management consultancy focusing on fixed income finance. She has studied and been an affiliated researcher in universities in Brazil, France, Mozambique, and the UK, and earned her doctorate in urban planning from Columbia University, where she was a National Science Foundation IGERT fellow in international development and globalization.