Clara García-Sánchez has joined our research group as an Assistant Professor (tenure track), after receiving the Delft Technology Fellowship.
Clara completed her degree in aerospace engineering in 2011 at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain. During her degree she performed two international stays: at Politecnico di Milano, Italy, and École Polytechnique de Montréal, Canada. After finishing her degree, she completed the research master in fluid dynamics at the von Karman Institute, Belgium. One year after, she was awarded a grant for Strategic Basic Research (IWT) to pursue her PhD degree in physics, in collaboration between the University of Antwerp and the von Karman Institute, where she graduated in 2017. During her PhD, she performed additional collaborations at Columbia University and Stanford University, USA. Before joining our group, she was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Global Ecology department at Carnegie Institution for Science.
Her research is focused on wind engineering problems, specifically addressing dispersion and airflow predictions in the built environment. She is interested in renewable energies, as well as mitigation techniques that can allow to prevent and reduce urban pollution. Part of her research focuses on applying uncertainty quantification methodologies for the prediction of winds in the urban canopy. The approach allows to study the natural variability of the wind, which further improves the level of confidence in the numerical results, by adding risk assessment margins based on realistic probabilities. These type of studies grant additional knowledge related to pedestrian wind comfort and pollution maps, information that can be useful to optimize sustainable urbanizations.