Gruia Bădescu is a researcher and practitioner specialized on urban recovery in post-war and post-dictatorship contexts, integrated urban development, and urban memory. He holds an MSc in City Design and Social Science from the LSE's Cities Programme and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge. As a practitioner, Gruia worked in integrated urban development planning in Romania, Armenia, Georgia and Moldova, as well as policy research, urban design, and strategic planning for the Center for Sustainable Destinations at the National Geographic Society, UNDP, the World Bank, Space Syntax Romania, and the Association for an Urban Transition. He is the vice-president of the Romanian Center for Innovation in Local Development. He has taught as a departmental lecturer at the University of Oxford, and since 2019 he has been a Research Fellow at the University of Konstanz in Germany and a visiting lecturer in urban studies at SNSPA Bucharest. He published extensively on post-war reconstruction in the former Yugoslavia and the Middle East, as well as post-dictatorship urbanism and memorialization in Romania, Chile and Argentina.