Dr. Giulia Celentano

Dr. Giulia Celentano, Senior Scientific Assistant, is currently a Humanitarian Research Fellow placed at the International Committee of the Red Cross (Beirut, Lebanon) to work on capacity building of ICRC and local staff for resilient health infrastructructures in conflict-like scenarios.

Prior her secondment at the ICRC, she was  the focal point in the Chair for applied research projects in the Humanitarian and Development sector, based on collaborations with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC),  and the United Nations (UN-HABITAT, UNHCR), including design-assisted tool development, sustainability assessments and strategic advisory. 

Her academic work has an impact-orient and field-based approach, with a focus on sustainable strategies for the built environment in  humanitarian projects and contexts of scarce resources in the Global South, as informal settlements, post-disaster and post-conflict settlements. With a major interest in the Middle East and hard-to-reach sites, she worked in diverse conexts in the MENA region, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central America and South East Asia.

Besides research and  project management tasks (as the ETH-ICRC Humanitarian Action Challenge: Building Resilience in Health Infrastructure, ETH-Global Shelter Cluster SEAT Solar Energy Advisory Tool  and ETH-ICRC-EPFL Sustainable Construction Tool), Dr. Celentano is the coordinator of the MOOC in Regenerative Materials (launch scheduled for September 2025), lecturer at the CAS in Regenerative Material,and in various  courses offered at D-BAUG and D-ARCH Master level, and covered visiting and guest professorship positions in Politecnico di Milano and ETSAM in Madrid. She developed her Ph.D. at the Chair of Sustainable Construction, investigating "The regenerative development potential of the construction sector in the informal city: the cases of Bangkok, Nairobi and Cape Town", based on field-based data collection and a trans-disciplinary socio-technical approach.  

She holds a Bachelor in Architecture and Construction from Politecnico di Milano (2009) and a MSc of Architecture from the same University,  a Master level short course in Shelter and Settlements in Emergencies (Natural Disaster) from the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC) and Oxford Brookes University, and was a guest researcher at MIT ReAct.  Prior to joining the Chair, Dr. Celentano got hands-on training on nature-based construction technologies, which led to her to start working with diverse NGOs on field-based construction projects for a few years before moving to academia.