Zahra Alinam

She has a bachelors in architecture (2011), a masters in urban design (2014) and a PhD in Urbanism (2021) from Tabriz Islamic Art University, Iran. She was ranked the first in all three degrees in the university and was a member of the University Exceptional Talents Department.The four-year undergraduate program in Architecture formed the basis of her perseverance towards achieving an in-depth knowledge in the field of research and design. To develop her knowledge in the field of design she took the two-year graduate program in Urban Design. While studying for her master thesis, she developed a particular interest in psychological structures, which impact human behaviors in the environment. Her master thesis was a research-based project discussing an interdisciplinary topic between the fields of Urban Design and Environmental psychology. During this project, she had the opportunity to gain experience of applying a variety of quantitative and qualitative research methods, and this skill helped her to start writing research papers for journals and conferences. Her interest in research led her to enter a PhD. In her doctoral thesis she was investigating the intimate relation between environmental structure, conceptual construal of space, language, and cultural transmission. Using an original experimental approach utilizing virtual reality, she tested the hypothesis that differences in urban spatial layout can motivate different conceptualizations of space that get enhanced and conventionalized through cultural transmission and Iterated learning. This research provided the background for her entry into socio-cultural issues in the study of people's behavior in the urban environment. During her PhD, she had the chance to attend at the Aarhus University, Denmark as a visiting researcher (2018) at the School of Communication and Culture. During her 9-month stay in this department, she was able to win the Seeds Fund 2020 to experiment her project in Cognition and Behavior Labs at Aarhus University.She has several articles in the interdisciplinary field of environmental psychology and urbanism that have been published in prestigious journals and presented at international conferences. Topics specific to these areas of interest are: 1- The cognitive route to spatial behaviors 2- The cultural route to conceptualization of space 3- Affording urban qualities to urban spaces.She has more than seven years experience as a lecturer in Architecture and Urbanism Faculty of Tabriz Islamic Art University and over 10 years of experience as a designer and research assistant for the Technical Department of Tabriz Islamic Art University during her master's and PhD. Due to her professional background, from ramping-up projects in close coordination with design team to preparing working and presentation drawings on various urban and architectural projects, she is equipped with the skills and knowledge necessary to implement pre-design research projects.Currently, she is a postdoctoral associate funded by Fapesp at the State University of Campinas, Brazil. She is a member of CEUCI team, working on the Innovation and Knowledge-based Urban Districts project: Communicating urban perception through City Information Modeling and Virtual Reality a study based on environmental psychology. (Fonte: Currículo Lattes)