Valentina Sumini

Recognized under Tier 3 — Structural Habitats, Valentina Sumini conducts innovative work at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and space exploration at the MIT Media Lab. Sumini's research on adaptive and deployable habitat systems for extreme environments — bridging the disciplines of design, materials science, and human factors — addresses one of the most complex and human-centered challenges of long-duration spaceflight and planetary settlement. This boundary-pushing work grapples directly with one of the most vital questions facing Mars colonization: what it truly means to build a home beyond Earth, and how habitat systems can adapt to conditions no terrestrial architecture has ever had to meet.