Edna Ely-Ledesma is an assistant professor in the UW-Madison Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture and the director of the Kaufman Lab for the Study and Design of Food Systems and Marketplaces.
The corpus of her research, teaching, and mentoring focuses on understanding the development of the smart, green, and just 21st century city, in particularly the cultural landscapes of immigrant populations, micro-economies, and their development of a new understanding of city place.
She holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Science from Texas A&M University, a Master of Architecture and a Master of Urban Design from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University. She is a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow. In 2016 she was the Emerging Scholar of Race & Gender Fellow in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2017 she was the Carlos E. Castañeda Postdoctoral Fellow for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.