Laia Mogas-Soldevila

Laia Mogas-Soldevila is an Assistant Professor of Graduate Architecture and Director of DumoLab Research at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Laia’s research focuses on radically sustainable material practices bridging science, engineering, and the arts. Her pedagogy supports novel theory and applied methods understanding biomaterials and bio-based fabrication in product design and architecture. Over the past ten years while teaching at UPC, MIT, Cornell, and Penn, Laia has built scholarship reconsidering matter as a fundamental design driver and partnering with scientists to redesign it towards unprecedented environmental capabilities.

She has recently received the prestigious Johnson&Johnson Foundation Woman in STEM2D Scholar Award as well as Penn Grants by the Research Foundation, Environmental Innovation, Sachs Art Innovation, and Global Engagement Fund. Her work has been shown at the NYC and SF MoMA as part of Mediated Matter Group in 2022, at Milan’s and London’s Design Weeks in 2023, the ICA Philadelphia for ACADIA 2023, the Athens Opera House during Nostos Festival 2021, and at the Barcelona D-HUB for Design Does 2020. Laia holds an interdisciplinary doctorate bridging biomaterials science, biomedical engineering, and advanced design from Tufts University School of Engineering, two master’s degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture, and is a licensed architect with a minor in Fine Arts by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia School of Architecture in Barcelona and the École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts in Paris.