Catalina Freixas

Catalina Freixas has taught in the Sam Fox School since 2004. She is engaged in urban humanities research and practice, with a focus on resiliency in natural, built, and social environments. She has developed a series of research questions and metrics for analysis that connect the natural, economic, and social facets of the urban environment, and a quantitative model to evaluate eco-urbanism strategies. Her work also has focused on the broad range of consequences of urban segregation locally, leading to the book Segregation by Design: Conversations and Calls for Action in St. Louis (Springer, 2019). Her research has been supported by grants from the Missouri Humanities Council and The Divided City initiative, among others. She has shared her findings widely through conference presentations and in peer-reviewed papers and publications.

Freixas weaves her approach to resilient design into the studios and seminars she teaches and has had a significant impact on the trajectories of the careers of students in the Sam Fox School’s undergraduate and graduate programs. She is the advisor for the School’s undergraduate minor in architecture—a position that has ensured a growing interest in architecture, participatory design, and resilience among the broader WashU student body—and has served as director of the Architecture Discovery Program for high school students since 2012. Based on her work related to equity and social policy, Freixas also has been appointed an affiliate professor in WashU’s Social Policy Institute.