Santiago is a Colombian urban planner fascinated by how government insights can be transformed into meaningful and implementable change for vulnerable urban populations.

He joined Living Cities as a 2017 summer intern at the New York City office, where his work focused on assessing the Equipt to Innovate framework and building the City Accelerator curriculum. Prior to joining Living Cities, Santiago served as a Research Assistant at the Center for an Urban Future, where he helped build a global repository of government innovations and provided analytical insights for a publication on New York City’s foreign-born aging population.

Santiago also worked as a consultant for the World Bank as part of the NYU Advanced Project in International Development in India. While there, he assessed urban design, policy, and safety implications of several infrastructure upgrade initiatives funded by the Bank’s South Asia Region unit.

Santiago holds a Bachelor’s degree in Government and International Affairs from Universidad Externado de Colombia and a Masters in Urban Planning from New York University.