Professor Marta Fernandez has a strong interest in urban wellbeing, particularly the impact of design and technology for healthy ageing, and has been a member of European expert panels for nature-based solutions in cities, energy efficient buildings and healthy buildings. Marta’s career has spanned senior management roles in the UK, including Global Research Leader at international consultancy Arup.

In 2021, she was appointed an RMIT University Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation Professor. She has held honorary appointments at University College London and Imperial College Business School and is member of the Executive Board and Steering Committee of the European Construction Technology Platform, the Triple Helix Association and is a Non-executive Director of Thomas Telford Ltd in the UK.

Her recent interests include regenerative design principles, specifically understanding the impacts of regenerative design interventions in complex systems; focussing on issues of circularity, community engagement, resource flow, ecology, and biodiversity, providing actionable insights for sustainable development.

Other areas of interest include digital twins for planning and management of transport and essential services, and their interface with other interconnected critical national infrastructure sectors for crisis response and resilience. She connects with RMIT teams that focus on the development of models that capture the likelihood of failure of infrastructure against different types and intensities of hazards (e.g. wildfires, flood, storm damage, earthquakes).

Marta has a doctorate degree in carbon sequestration from University College London and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and the Institution of Engineering and Technology in the UK.