Nadina Galle, PhD grew up in Canada watching ecosystems get cleared and subdivisions go up in their place — then get named Meadow Heights, Forest Glen, Willow Creek. The nature was eulogized in the name while it was erased in practice. That strangeness never left her.
She became an ecological engineer, and spent years studying urban nature across four continents before deciding the most useful thing she could do was get that knowledge into the hands of the people who actually shape cities. The Internet of Nature® — a framework for using emerging technologies to strengthen urban ecosystems — began as her doctoral research at University College Dublin and MIT’s Senseable City Lab, and has since become the heart of a decade of applied work.
In 2024, HarperCollins published her book The Nature of Our Cities — a #1 Amazon bestseller, translated into Dutch, with the paperback released in March 2026. She has been named a National Geographic Explorer, a Fulbright Scholar, a Van Leer Foundation Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30. She hosts the Internet of Nature Podcast, now in its seventh season with over 50,000 downloads.
Her work has taken her in directions she didn’t anticipate: advising institutional investors on biodiversity monitoring across real estate portfolios, helping shape the next decade of park management at Chapultepec — Mexico City’s largest urban forest — and leading multi-million dollar research on the links between urban nature and human health.
A graduate of the University of Toronto (BSc, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, 2014), she returns to the School of Cities as Urbanist in Residence to convene the Internet of Nature Lab — a design sprint producing an actionable menu of interventions for the City of Toronto’s urban forest.