She is director of the Barcelona Laboratory for Urban Environmental Justice and Sustainability (BCNUEJ), research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and senior researcher at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA). She earned a PhD in Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before returning to Europe in 2011 on a Marie Curie International Fellowship.

Her research examines the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy and sustainable cities, and how community groups in disadvantaged neighbourhoods contest the existence, creation or exacerbation of environmental inequalities as a result of urban (re)development processes and policies. Since 2016, she is the principal investigator of a five-year ERC-funded project called GreenLULUs that examines green inequalities in forty cities in Europe, the United States and Canada. She is the research group coordinator and co-leader of the research lines Environmental and Climate Gentrification and Urban Climate Risk, Infrastructure and Justice at BCNUEJ.