BIO-NARRATIVE
Scholar: Maria Rallah E. Villaseca

Mara is an architect and instructor at the Architecture Department, College of Engineering and Architecture of the University of Science & Technology of Southern Philippines (USTP). She concurrently holds an administrative designation as the Assistant Director of the USTP Infrastructure Planning and Facilities Development Office. She will be joining Ohio State University as a recipient of the Knowlton PhD Award for City and Regional Planning, Knowlton School of Architecture. Doctorate students of CRP will be pursuing two fields of specialization of their choice. Mara will be focusing on Environmental Planning and Sustainability, and Urban Design and Physical Planning.

She completed a Bachelor of Science and Architecture at the University of the Philippines Mindanao in 2008 and finished Master of ASEAN Studies at the University of the Philippines Open University in 2020. She was with the UP Mindanao Department of Architecture Faculty from 2011 to 2015 until she joined the Makati Development Corporation as a technical supervisor from 2015 to 2017. Mara has since focused her academic and administrative endeavors at USTP with the enhancement of its infrastructure delivery systems as one of her most trailblazing outputs. It was through this responsibility that Mara understood the necessity and the challenges involved in crafting Land Use Development and Infrastructure Plans (LUDIP) for Philippine State Universities and Colleges. She seeks higher studies in urban and regional planning so she may be able to apply her learnings in developing a systematic guideline for LUDIP development in the context of sustainability. She aims to refine the LUDIP for USTP’s eight campuses ---three of which are emerging Science & Technology Parks in Mindanao. Mara also functions as a regular member of the USTP Science & Technology Parks Management Committee and has made significant contributions as the Infrastructure Component Lead for the USTP AGILA and Claveria Agropolis S&T Parks.

In her spare time, she hangs around USTP’s fabrication laboratory to work with her team on the prototypes for ModMAG, a modular magnetic wall panel system that she was able to successfully register with the Bureau of Patents, Philippine Intellectual Property Office in 2018. ModMAG won as the second most outstanding Utility Model in DOST’s Regional Invention Contests and Exhibits (DOST-RICE) in 2019.