Andrea is a Senior Researcher at the United Nations University - Institute for Environment and Human Security. She holds a PhD in Sustainability and has over ten years of experience as an architect-urbanist.
Andrea holds a PhD in Sustainability at the UPC (2022), developing research on the role of innovation based on nature and technology in the Besòs Coast, Barcelona, and the sustainable urban transformation process. She is an architect-urbanist with over ten years of experience, academic training in Architecture (2004) from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and MSc in Urbanism (2009) from TUDelft, Netherlands.
In 2016, she co-founded OAP Consultorías, a private organization that supports the development of municipal governments in the Boyacá region of Colombia, designing public policies for territorial development in Colombia. She has combined consultancy and academia at the University of Boyacá (Tunja), teaching Land Management in the Master's Program in Urbanism (2016-2017) and at the University of Santo Tomás as coordinator of the Urban-Environmental component (2017). From 2012 to 2015, she was a civil servant in charge of the Local Government Planning Office in Tunja (a city with 180K inhabitants), where she promoted the updating of its land use planning regulations (POT), Agenda 2019 and Agenda 2039 "Tunja: City of knowledge. " From 2010 to 2017, she collaborated as a volunteer researcher for the group "Urban Processes in Environment, Housing and Informality" of the National University of Colombia (Bogotá), where she took part in research on neighbourhoods and urban improvement and the comprehensive readjustment of informal establishments in Colombian cities. From 2004 to 2010, she worked as an architect for several private and public companies. She was mainly involved in the design process of schools owned in Bogotá, a critical project focused on changing access to education and spatial conditions in low-income communities.