Tomas Diez Ladera

Tomas Diez is an urbanist specialised in digital fabrication and its implications in the future of cities and society. He is one of the founders of Fab Lab Barcelona at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) and now he is leading the Fab City Research Laboratory.

Tomas leads the FAB City Global Initiative and helps to run the Fab Academy program with a distributed team located in more than 50 Fab Labs globally. He is also the European project manager for the Fab Foundation. Tomas holds a Bachelor degree in Urban Planning and Sociology by the University Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela, a Diploma in social work from the University of Havana, Cuba, a Master in Advanced Architecture by IAAC, and a Diploma on Digital Fabrication in a pilot program on the class “How to Make Almost Anything” offered by the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms in 2008.

Tomas is a tutor in Design Products at the Royal College of Arts in London, where he co-runs the Exploring Emergent Futures platform, he is co-founder of the Smart Citizen, FabLabs.io and StudioP52. Tomas has been appointed by The Guardian and Nesta as one of the top 10 digital social innovators to watch in 2013, and has been awarded by the Catalan ICT association as the entrepreneur of the year in 2014-15.