Alex Cabral

About Me

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I direct the SEED Lab, which focuses on Sensing, Engagement, Education, and Data to support environmental health and social wellbeing.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Ka Moamoa Lab at Georgia Tech and a 2025-2026 NSF ICICLE Educational Fellow. My primary research project was focused on designing and deploying low-cost sensing devices to monitor environmental factors of Manoomin, wild rice that grows in the Great Lakes region and is essential to Indigenous North American culture, economy, and sustenance. This work is part of the multi-institute Strong Manoomin Collective, which is funded by multiple NSF grants.

I earned a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard University, where I was co-advised by Jim Waldo and Amy Mueller and selected as a 2024 Siebel Scholar and CPS Rising Star. My PhD research was focused on designing reliable, scalable, and equitable sensor networks for urban environmental sensing, and part of that work was recognized with a Best Poster Award at EWSN 2024. From 2020 to 2022, I was a member of the Urban Innovation group at Microsoft Research, where I helped deploy and maintain the Eclipse air quality sensing network.

Research Interests

Low-Cost Sensor Networks: hardware co-design, energy harvesting, network deployment strategies
Smart Cities: urban informatics, city and community engagement, urban digital twins
Environmental Informatics: spatiotemporal data visualization, data sovereignty
Low Resource Computing: edge computing, small language models, computing in rural areas and the Global South

About Me

Research Interests

Recent News