Miho Mazereeuw is Assistant Professor and Founding Director of the Urban Risk Lab in the School of Architecture & Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Working on a large, territorial scale with an interest in public spaces and the urban experience, architect and landscape architect she is known for her work in disaster resilience. The Urban Risk Lab is a cross-disciplinary organization of researchers, designers and decision makers affiliated with MIT – operating at the intersection of risk and disaster, storms and earthquakes, floods and fires, ecology and infrastructure, research and action, addressing the most challenging aspects of contemporary urbanization. The Urban Risk Lab is a place to research and innovate on technologies, techniques, materials, processes, and systems to reduce risk. We develop methods to embed risk reduction and preparedness into the design of the regions, cities and everyday urban spaces to increase the resilience of local communities.

Miho Mazereeuw taught at the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University and the University of Toronto, Canada. She was also an Associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture and worked in the offices of Shigeru Ban and Dan Kiley.

As an Arthur W Wheelwright Fellow, she completed Preemptive Design: Disaster and Urban Development along the Pacific Ring of Fire featuring case studies on infrastructure design, multifunctional public space and innovative planning strategies in earthquake prone regions. Her design work on disaster prevention has been exhibited globally. As the director of the Urban Risk Lab, she collaborates on a number of projects with institutions and organizations in the field of disaster reconstruction/prevention including work in Haiti, India, Japan and Chile.

Miho Mazereeuw is also the co-director of OPSYS working with Pierre Bélanger. Conceived as part-laboratory and part-workshop, OPSYS envisions the design of open-ended, fluid ecological systems as the basis for adaptable, flexible and organic infrastructures, across a multitude of scales that support and promote contemporary urban life.

She completed a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in sculpture and environmental science at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, USA and a Master in Architecture & Landscape Architecture with Distinction at the Harvard GSD where she was awarded the Janet Darling Webel Prize and the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship.

She was a workshop expert on the Pacific Ring of Fire at the 5th International Forum for Sustainable Construction dedicated to “Infrastructure Space” held April 7-9, 2016 in Detroit, USA.

Miho Mazereeuw was winner of a LafargeHolcim Awards Acknowledgement prize 2017 for Water Collective: Multifunctional public space in Thecho, Nepal. The project replaces an existing dilapidated guesthouse with a new multifunctional building. The new structure restores and enhances a historic Paati that was damaged in the 2015 earthquake.