prof. dr. ir. A (Ana) Pereira Roders, MSc

Ana Pereira Roders is Professor in Heritage and Values and UNESCO Chair on Heritage and the Reshaping of Urban Conservation for Sustainability at TU Delft (The Netherlands). Alongside this role, she is also a part-time PhD researcher at Wageningen University & Research, working on the thesis “Rights of Buildings: An Ecocentric Legal Framework for Governance Reform in the Built Environment”, supervised by Prof. dr. Louis Kotzé and Dr. Nadia Bernaz.

Trained as an architect at Universidade Lusíada (Portugal), Ana obtained her PhD at TU Eindhoven in 2007 with the thesis “RE-ARCHITECTURE: Lifespan Rehabilitation of Built Heritage.” Since then, she has built an international academic career across the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, the UK, and Mozambique. While her work at TU Delft focuses on bridging heritage and sustainability, particularly in urban conservation, her PhD at WUR opens a new line of inquiry: advancing legal reform by exploring whether buildings themselves could be recognized as right-holders within governance systems.

Through her professorship at TU Delft and her PhD at WUR, Ana works toward inclusive, resilient, and sustainable cities — combining heritage-led urban conservation with legal innovation in the governance of the built environment.

A true promoter of international cooperation and knowledge exchange, she has organized key global events, built professional networks with more than 10,000 members, and pioneered the Journal of Cultural Heritage Management and Sustainable Development (Emerald), which she co-edited until 2019. Her award-winning research is widely recognized for being interdisciplinary and methodical, disseminated in hundreds of publications and international events.

Ana is also a regular assessor of research proposals and outcomes for funding institutions, publishers, and universities. She continues to serve on international boards, including the governing board of the International Center on Space Technology for Natural and Cultural Heritage (China) and the scientific board of the JPI Cultural Heritage.