Salma Abouelhossein is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies and Planning at Harvard University and a doctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for the Study of Architecture and Urbanism in the Muslim World. For the 2025–2026 academic year, she is a recipient of the Harvard Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Dissertation Writing Fellowship. Beginning in September 2025, she will serve as a Visiting Research Fellow at the Friedrich-Meinecke Institut at Freie Universität Berlin.

Salma’s research, situated at the intersection of environmental history and critical geography, investigates the entangled histories of infrastructural planning and primary commodity production in Egypt’s sugar belt during the twentieth century.

This work has been supported by several fellowships and grants, including those from the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), the Harvard Center for African Studies, the Mellon Foundation, the Harvard Weatherhead Center, and the Radcliffe Institute. In the summer term of 2025, she was a Landhaus Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at LMU Munich

Salma is a research affiliate of the Urban Theory Lab—formerly based at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and now at the University of Chicago. She is also a member of the Global Urban History Project (GUHP) Emerging Scholars cohort for 2025–2026.

Salma holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the American University in Cairo and a Master of Science in Urban Planning and Development from University College London. Before beginning her doctoral studies, she worked as an urban planning practitioner with various organizations across the Middle East.