Paola Capo is the Director of Resilience & Disaster Response for AIA. She strives to provide architects and communities with the resources they need to create healthier, more sustainable, resilient, and equitable built environments. In her current role, she divides her time between managing the Disaster Assistance Program (assisting architects and AIA chapters before and after disaster events occur) and supporting Communities by Design, a program of the Architects Foundation that matches communities with interdisciplinary expertise to achieve community aspirations. In her time at AIA, Paola has supported several other portfolios related to sustainability and climate action including the 2030 Commitment program, the Materials Pledge, and the Committee on the Environment with a focus on capacity-building for architects, firms, and chapters.

Paola recently completed a Masters in Emergency Management from Tulane University. In 2020, she completed IAP2’s Foundations in Public Participation Program, and in 2019 she participated in UC Berkeley’s [IN]City program to expand on her knowledge in urban design. She graduated from Georgetown University in 2017 with a degree in Science, Technology, and International Affairs, concentrating in Energy and the Environment.

Ana is an architect in Tallahassee who researches practices that contribute to lasting housing resilience. Her work is about supporting architects and neighbors in bridging between regulatory systems and lived experience. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the UF Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER). 

Karla Saldana Ochoa is a Tenured Track Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and a faculty affiliate at the AI2 Center, the Center of Latin American Studies, and FIBER. She directs the AI in Architecture Graduate Certificate program and oversees the SHARE Lab, a research group focused on developing projects that leverage the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and human intelligence, applied to enhance creativity in architectural design and create tools to analyze big data of urban phenomena. At UF, Karla works with Digital Twins (DT), which she defines as intelligent environments, focusing on how this technology is applied across various scales—from buildings to city-wide infrastructure. She collaborates on international projects in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Mexico, and Ecuador. Karla is an Ecuadorian architect and coder with a Master of Advanced Studies in Landscape Architecture and a Ph.D. in Technology in Architecture from ETH Zurich. Her Ph.D. research focused on the integration of Artificial and Human Intelligence to achieve accurate and agile responses to natural disasters, utilizing a multimodal fusion approach for machine learning inference.