Ramon Gras is a City and Infrastructure Researcher and Designer from Barcelona, working on the urban innovation space. Ramon’s research focuses on aligning urban design with economic activation strategies, by means of complexity science and network theory-based city planning techniques. The main goal of Ramon’s research is to develop artificial intelligence and machine learning models to support civil engineering, architecture, and urban design criteria contributing to ignite the latent economic forces in society, thus enabling the generation of distributed prosperity. Alongisde fellow Aretian Co-Founder Jeremy Burke, Ramon Gras published the first-ever Atlas of Innovation Districts in 2019.

Ramon graduated from the inaugural cohort of Harvard’s brand-new Design Engineering  program, where he developed research around urban design criteria for innovation districts operating in synergy with logistics hubs. At Harvard, Ramon developed an urban design plan for the redevelopment of the Port of Tallinn, Estonia, as well as urban studies for the Boston Seaport innovation district. Prior to developing his joint thesis with Jeremy Burke at Harvard, Ramon worked at Ferrovial’s Innovation office in London, where he led cutting-edge design and technology projects at the London Heathrow Airport Expansion Project, and the London Underground. Before his experience in London, Ramon’s thesis at MIT addressed the consolidation problem in air freight transportation by designing an advanced Business Intelligence platform.

Ramon’s urban design and transportation modeling projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology included the de-elevation of the McGrath Highway and urban renewal along the Green Line extension in Somerville, urban design criteria to develop the future MIT Campus Expansion in Kendall Square, and addressing the transportation needs of the Boston Seaport Innovation District. He expanded his training at MIT after working as a designer in major infrastructure projects involving architectural design (a Richard Rogers project), urban planning, urban transportation studies, bridge design, maritime infrastructure, and high-speed rail systems. Ramon’s early research at BarcelonaTech focused on bridge design, high performance materials, and nanotechnology applications for structural engineering. Ramon is interested in enhancing innovation around Cities, Technology and Infrastructure, by designing creative and rigorous interdisciplinary solutions to address large, complex challenges facing the cities of the future.