Oana Druta

Oana Druta is Associate Professor Housing and Inclusive Urban Living in the research group Urbanism and Urban Architecture at the TU/e Department of Built Environment. Oana is a social/cultural geographer and urban planner, researching young adult housing and precarity; urban commons and participation; shared and flexible living; homeownership and intergenerational relations. Between 2022 and 2025, Oana coordinated the Dutch leg of the JPI Urban Europe Capacities for Urban Transformations project CoNECT (Collective Networks for Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition). Currently, her research portfolio includes the DUT project EcoCARE (Ecologies of Care: Multispecies Design and Circular Community Economies in Peri-Urban Settings) where she is the project coordinator, and the NWA project Passende Huisvesting (Home for all: Transformative research towardsa a paradigm shift from shelters to housing), where she leads a work package focused on proposing housing concepts for addressing youth homelessness. Between 2020 and 2022, Oana was a board member of the Eindhoven Young Academy of Engineering and coordinated the activities of the Urban Innovation Think Tank at Built Environment. In 2021, with colleagues at the University of Milan Bicocca and KU Leuven, Oana initiated a new working group of the European Network for Housing Research named Housing and Young People. She is an associate editor of the International Journal of Housing Policy and is active on the advisory boards of Housing Studies and Housing and Society.

Originally from Bucharest, Romania, Oana Druta received a BA degree in cultural anthropology from the University of Tsukuba (Japan) in 2009. During this time she received the Ministry of Education Scholarship awarded to elite international students in Japan. Later, Oana completed her Masters of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Michigan (USA), graduating in 2011. During her Master's studies, Oana was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg scholarship for students advancing social justice, and the distinction for exceptional service to Taubman College and the Urban and Regional Planning program. Her master's capstone project was awarded the prize for Best Student Project by the American Institute of Certified Planners. In 2012, Oana started her PhD 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 (Tokyo, Japan) and Bucharest University 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