TEAM
Meet the team
We are a team of mission-driven researchers, urban planners, designers, and engineers. The concept behind COMAS was developed from 2018 when founders Larissa and Samuel worked on research and advocacy projects on sustainable community food systems and community economic development together when completing their MSc's at Pratt Insitute in New York City. The collective started working together in mid-2020 as a distributed global team, with members mainly from the US, Iceland, and Germany. We are all passionate about the future of sustainable and equitable communities and cities.
We follow a horizontal organizational structure and work via self-organized, collaborative teams with respective leads according to expertise. It is in our mission to experiment with cooperative and democratic organizational systems to lead the change.
Larissa Lai
Founder + Initiator
Sustainable Community Development Researcher & Planner
Samuel Pressman
Founder + Green Lead
Ecological Systems Designer
Jose Luis Holgado Alvarez
Tech Lead
AI Researcher and Engineer
Zane Younger
Research + Grants Manager
Public Health Researcher
Sylva Lam
Designer
Interior & Restaurant Designer/Architect
Jenny Fan
UX/UI and Product Designer
Elif Karakose
UX Designer and Architect
Veronica Burnham
Software Engineer
James Kelleher
Data Engineer
Caesar Caberto
Illustrator and Graphic Designer