Sara Jensen Carr

College of Arts, Media and Design Assistant Professor, focuses on the connections between landscape, human health, urban ecology, and design

Sara Jensen Carr’s teaching and research focuses on the connections between landscape, human health, urban ecology, and design. Her current book in progress, The Topography of Wellness: Health and the American Urban Landscape, examines landscape responses to six historical urban epidemics and the implication for current and future practice.
Sara holds a Master of Architecture from Tulane University, and a Master of Landscape Architecture and PhD in Environmental Planning from University of California Berkeley, where she was the co-founding editor of the ASLA Award-winning GROUND UP Journal. She is a licensed architect who has worked professionally in New Orleans and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her research and representational work has been exhibited at San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) gallery, the National Building Museum in Washington D.C., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2017, she held a residential Mellon Fellowship in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.
Prior to arriving at Northeastern, she held a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and Office of Public Health Studies at University of Hawai’i at Manoa, where she worked with several local nonprofits and agencies on evaluation and design initiatives, including the Hawai’i Department of Health, the Native Hawaiian Health Program at Queens Medical Center, and the Outrigger Duke Kahanamoku Foundation. She is also an advisory board member at Design 4 Active Sacramento, a cross-sector, award-winning team that advocates for and advises on active design initiatives.