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Gara Villalba is associate professor of the Department of Chemical, Biological and Environmental Engineering of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB). Her bachelor’s degree is from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998), and her PhD from the University of Barcelona (2003), both in chemical engineering.
She dedicates her research to the study and optimization of resource metabolism, a broad multidisciplinary area where she applies her chemical engineering skills to industrial ecology methods such as Material Flow Analysis and Life Cycle Analysis. The applications of this systems-focused research are diverse and multidisciplinary, such as: assessing the sustainability of new technologies that make use of non-renewable and scarce metals; quantifying the material, energy and water consumption at urban scale to establish baseline GHG emission accounting protocols; and waste-to-energy optimization and evaluation for improved municipal solid waste management.
Presently her research is focused on the energy-food-water nexus in urban metabolism studies, reconciling bottom-up emission factor-based inventories with top-down atmospheric model emissions. She is an affiliate researcher at the School of Engineering, UC Merced, where she carried out her Marie Curie fellowship URBANCO2Flux from 2015 until 2017. She teaches in the undergraduate and postgraduate degrees of the department of chemical, biological, and environmental engineering at the UAB.
