Sylvia Jiménez Riofrío

Sylvia Jiménez Riofrío is a doctoral student at MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning pursuing an Advanced Urbanism concentration with the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU), where she holds a Fulbright and LCAU fellowship. Her research interests encompass sustainability indicators of the built environment at the building and urban scale and their repercussions on human health and well-being.

Sylvia holds an architecture diploma from the School of Architecture, Design, and Arts at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador -PUCE, where she has served as associate professor, former Dean, and Coordinator for the Master in Urbanism program. With a postgraduate degree in Developing and Planning from University College London and an Inter-American Development Bank fellowship, her academic work has explored passive architecture, climate analysis, daylight, and thermal comfort across scales, emphasizing human comfort and health.

She has collaborated with grassroots, public sector, academic, and multilateral organizations within multidisciplinary research teams for over ten years. Currently is a principal investigator at the Center for Research in Health for Latin America CISeAL-PUCE at the Healthy Homes for Healthy Living Initiative.