Mennatullah Hendawy (2022-2024)

Mennatullah Hendawy is an interdisciplinary urban planner working on the intersection of cities, ethics, communication, and technology toward equitable and sustainable urbanism. Hendawy is an Assistant Professor at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. She is also affiliated with Impact Circles e.V. and the Center for Advanced Internet Studies in Germany and the University of California Santa Cruz in the USA. In 2021, she received her Ph.D. in Planning Building Environment from TU Berlin in Germany with a summa cum laude. In 2015, she completed an MSc. in Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design with a focus on urban policies from Stuttgart University. Hendawy holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering from Ain Shams University in Cairo, Department of Urban Planning and Design. Hendawy is the PI of a MOOC project on Urban AI in Africa (funded by EPFL). Earlier, she was a research associate at the Chair of Urban Design, TU Berlin. Between 2017-2021, Hendawy was a visiting researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society. Hendawy was a fellow at different institutions such as the European Societies of the European New School of Digital Studies at European University Viadrina, Poland/Germany(2022), the Orient Institute Beirut, Lebanon (2021) and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation department at Columbia University, USA (2020)

Contact: mennatullah.hendawy@impactcircles.org

Alejandra Reyes (2023-2025)

Alejandra Reyes is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy at UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology. Her research centers on questions of governance around housing policy, finance, production, and access – and highlights the critical influence of political and economic factors on housing and urban development.

Previously, she was the 2018-2019 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute on Municipal Finance and Governance at University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. She received her B.A. in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley and a M.S. and Ph.D. in Community and Regional Planning at the University of Texas at Austin.

Contact: lreyesru@uci.edu