Dr. Zahra Alinam (she/her)
Main Focus
Dr. Zahra Alinam is a postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Department of Coevolution of Land Use and Urbanisation (MPI-GEA). Her work bridges cognitive science and urban design to examine how people perceive, conceptualize, and interact with urban spaces. She combines environmental psychology, spatial analysis, and virtual reality to study how cultural conventions and environmental affordances shape spatial language, navigation, and social behavior. Her current research focuses on modeling environmental attunement—how individuals and groups adapt their perception and behavior to the affordances of their surroundings—alongside social affordances and behavioral resilience across diverse urban contexts and temporal scales.
Curriculum Vitae
Dr. Zahra Alinam is an urban designer and architect with expertise in environmental psychology and cognitive science. She holds a PhD in Urbanism from Tabriz Islamic Art University (Iran) and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology in Jena, Germany. Before joining the Institute, she was a FAPESP-funded Postdoctoral Fellow at the State University of Campinas (Brazil) and a Visiting Scholar at Tufts University (USA) and Aarhus University (Denmark). Her research integrates spatial analysis, eye-tracking, virtual reality, and agent-based modeling (ABM) to explore the cognitive and cultural dimensions of urban experience. She has authored interdisciplinary publications bridging urban design, cognitive science, and environmental psychology, contributing to evidence-based approaches that promote inclusive, resilient, and sustainable city futures.