Khaled Alawadi is the first UAE national scholar to specialize in the design of sustainable cities, Dr. Alawadi is Assistant Professor of Sustainable Urbanism at Khalifa University, where he founded the MSc. in Sustainable Critical Infrastructure program. He is a trained architect, planner and urban designer whose research is devoted to urban design, housing and urbanism, especially the relationships between the built environment and sustainable development. Dr. Alawadi recently served as Visiting Assistant Professor at MIT's Center for Advanced Urbanism, and previously worked as an architect for Dubai Municipality and as an Assistant Professor at UAE University. He holds a PhD in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin. And he has curated the National Pavilion UAE which presented Lifescapes Beyond Bigness, an exhibition exploring human-scale architectural landscapes, at the 2018 La Biennale di Venezia, or Venice Biennale. Dr. Alawadi is well established scholar who investigated timely and relevant topics to urban form and sustainability in the MENA region and he has published papers in top journals in urban planning and design such as the Journal of Planning Education and Research, Transportation Research A, Journal of Urban Design, Journal of Urbanism, Cities, and Sustainable Cities and Society.