Oana Druta

Oana Druta is an assistant professor with the research group Urbanism and Urban Architecture at the TU/e Department of Built Environment. Oana is a social/cultural geographer and urban planner, primarily conducting cross-national research in the field of housing. Her topics of interest include shared and flexible housing, urban commons and participation; housing pathways through the life-course; homeownership, aging in place, and intergenerational relations. To date, she has researched and written about urban housing phenomena in Detroit, Tokyo, Birmingham (UK), Bucharest, Milan, and Amsterdam. Oana is a member of the Eindhoven Young Academy of Engineering as well as representing TU Eindhoven in the NWO Social Sciences and Humanities Roundtables. She is the book review editor for the International Journal of Housing Policy and active on the advisory boards of Housing Studies, and Housing and Society. Within Built Environment, Oana coordinates the activities of the Urban Innovation Think Tank.

Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Oana Druta received a BA degree from the University of Tsukuba (Japan) in 2009. Later, she completed her Masters of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan (USA), graduating in 2011. In 2012, she started her Ph.D. at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (University of Amsterdam) embedded in the ERC funded project HOUWEL. In 2014, she was a visiting researcher at the University of Birmingham (UK), Waseda University (Japan) and Bucharest University (Romania) where she conducted fieldwork into the housing careers of young adults. Oana obtained her PhD in 2017, with her thesis on 'Young adult homeownership pathways and intergenerational support'. After having been a postdoctoral researcher at UvA, she was appointed assistant professor at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in May 2018.