Mariana Palumbo is an architect and researcher at the Materials Laboratory with the GICITED group at UPC-Tech. In 2008 she completed her studies in architecture at School of Architecture of Barcelona and l’ENSA Versailles. She holds a master degree in Advanced Architectural Projects from the School of Architecture of Madrid (ETSAM, UPM) and is currently a PhD student in sustainable materials in Barcelona, UPC.

She has been involved in several workshops on straw-bale construction and other alternative technologies and has supervised degree thesis on the development of low impact materials in architecture. She has studied at the University of Bath as a visiting scholar during her doctoral studies.

She is author of the thin-tile vault Bricktopia Pavilion, co-founder of the international collective map13 architects and partner of the Association Research in Sustainability that has been used as a platform to implement the results of her academic research.