Mara is a Lecturer in Urban Geography and Director of the MA/MSc Cities Programme at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also a visiting fellow at the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Mara is an urban geographer whose research focuses on the cross-class politics of urban space production, with an emphasis on the (re)production of socio-spatial inequality in urban Brazil. She completed a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies at LSE. She also holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.