Dr Claudia Murray is a Research Fellow at the Department of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School, University of Reading. Her research interests focus on urban development in Latin America, taking into consideration the region’s unique cultural and political milieu. Combining historical and contemporaneous knowledge of Latin America, Claudia’s work contributes to wider discussions on urban and peri-urban transformations in the Global South. Her main interest focuses on the region’s changing socio-political relations with the land and its natural environment. She is particularly interested in housing and sustainability; land allocation and planning; informality and resilience; inequality and well-being.
Claudia is also actively engaged in building research capacity in Latin America. She has worked with local governments to improve the quality of grant applications, transparency of funding mechanisms and the number of peer reviewed publications. She directed and developed the research network RedCTel, which was funded under the Newton-Caldas programme. In this network, she delivered training workshops including the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC}, which has helped to train hundreds of scientists remotely or via face-to-face interaction.