Dr Deljana Iossifova is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Manchester, where she is also Director of the Confucius Institute. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture and Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Studies Foundation and AzuKo Foundation. In 2021, she was a member of the judging panel for the RIBA President's Awards for Research.

Iossifova leads a portfolio of research on sustainable infrastructure and transitions. She has worked on complex urban transformations, cities and biodiversity and the human ecosystems of ageing. Her main research focus is on the Global East and South, including China, Japan, Bulgaria, India and Brazil. Trained as an architect at ETH Zurich, she practised in Germany, China, Japan and the USA before earning a PhD in Social Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology.

Iossifova is the author of Translocal Ageing in the Global East (Palgrave, 2020) and lead editor of Urban Infrastructuring (Springer, 2022) and Defining the Urban (Routledge, 2018). 

Recent funded research

• MICRA Seedcorn Award (£5,980) and Oxford Brookes Research Excellence Award (£7,629). Co-Principal Investigator. With Chiko Ncube (Oxford Brookes), Tanja Bastia and Nan Zhang. 'Infrastructures of care for and by older people in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (2022-2023)

• ESRC Impact Accelaration Award (£16,784). Principal Investigator. 'Right to Water' (2021)

• British Council Researcher Links Workshop (£24,000). Lead. UK China workshop in collaboration with Tongji in Shanghai, 'Towards Healthy China 2035:  Sustainable Urban Sanitation Infrasystems in the Yangtze River Delta' (2020)

• GCRF University of Manchester QR Allocation (£50,000). Principal Investigator/Convenor. Transdisciplinary workshop 'INFRA+' (2020-2021)

• Royal Society Resilient Futures Challenge-Led Grant (£499,993). International Lead and Principal Investigator. 'Towards Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brasil (TOSSIB)' (2019-2023)

• NERC Towards a Sustainable Earth (£519,880). International Lead and Principal Investigator. 'A Systems Approach to Sustainable Sanitation Challenges in Urbanising China (SASSI)' (2019-2022)

• Hallsworth Conference Fund (£20,000), University of Manchester. Principal Convenor. 'Urbanisation, Infrastructures and Everyday Life in East Asia' (2018-2019)

• ESRC Impact Acceleration Award (£20,128). Principal Investigator. ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: Tracing Urban Change between the Tokyo Olympics’ (2017)

• ESRC Strategic Network (£100,799). Principal Investigator, ‘Strategic Network: Data and Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems’ (2015-2017)

• Daiwa Foundation Award (£7,000). Principal Investigator, ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: a visual ethnography’ (2015)

• Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (£3,000). Principal Investigator, ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: a visual ethnography’ (2015)

• Ziqiu Ren (Architecture): Demonstrating Agencies and Assemblages of Food Markets as Socio-Urban Infrastructures in the Chinese Urban Context (Main Supervisor, with Huda Tayob) 
• Rujin Wang (Architecture): Older Women’s Life Satisfaction, Community Engagement, and Ageing in Place in High Density Urban Environments in China (Main Supervisor, with Nan Zhang) 
• Mark Shtanov (Architecture, SEED PGR Studentship): Urban Integration of Waste Management Processes (Main Supervisor, with Jaise Kuriakose) 
• Dongyang Mi (Geography, President's Doctoral Scholar, Manchester/Melbourne Scholarship): Hygienic citizenship: Shifting cultures of cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne and Saska Petrova) 
• Qiwei Peng (Architecture, CSC Scholarship): Elevated highways as social Infrastructures -interrogating the assemblage of diasporic pedestrian in Chongqing under-bridge space (Co-supervisor, with Stephen Walker)
• Purva Dewoolkar (Architecture, SEED PGR Studentship): The Politics of ‘Infrastructural limbo’: Community Infrastructures of Sanitation within the Informal Settlements of Mumbai (Main Supervisor, with Alison Browne)
• Junyan Ye (Architecture): The Design of Green Spaces on Campus: Meeting the Needs of Increasingly Diverse Student Groups (Main Supervisor, with Alison Browne and Matthew Dennis)
• Yahya Gamal (Architecture): Informal Urban Growth: An Analytical Descriptions Based Adaptive Simulation Model for Greater Cairo (Main Supervisor, with Nuno Pinto)
• Kunzhe Kang (Architecture): Constructing a Modernism Future in Contemporary Chinese Architecture? (Main Supervisor, with Stephen Walker)

Successfully completed:

• Qi Liu (Geography, 2022): Beyond tourist practices: Practice-based approaches to sustainable consumption and production in tourism in China (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne)
• Cecilia Alda Vidal (Geography, 2022): Urban transformation and everyday life: The politics of access to sanitation in Lilongwe, Malawi (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne)
• Debapriya Chakrabarti (Architecture, 2020): The Practice of Idol-making in Kumartuli: Cultural Heritage, Spatial Transformation and Neoliberal Governance in Kolkata (Main Supervisor, with Graham Haughton)
• Raqib Abu Salia (Architecture, 2020): Customary Land Tenure and Land Readjustment: Land Administration in Semi-Arid Ghana (Main Supervisor, with Ulysses Sengupta)
• Yan Yu (2018, British Council – CSC Visiting PhD Scholar, Architecture): The Revival of Chinese Traditional Villages under the Impact of Fast-Developing Urbanisation (Main Supervisor)
• Victoria Lawson (Planning, 2017): Can design deliver? A Liverpool case study of design-led city centre regeneration (Co-supervisor, with Graham Haughton)
• Zhenbo Yu (Planning, 2013): Regulation of Urban Character: Style, Colour and Historic Character in a Modern Chinese City – The Case of Harbin (Co-supervisor, with Michael Hebbert)