Marco Herndon, Program Associate

Marco is a program associate with the Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) team at the ESI. He specifically manages the team’s partnerships with organizations in Latin America — with a focus on Perú and Colombia — at the intersection of climate change, technology, and environmental planning.

Marco’s expertise is in building partnerships between researchers, technologists, and policymakers to approach challenges such as decarbonization, urban mobility, and sustainable development. Before joining the ESI, he completed a Master in City Planning degree with the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). While at DUSP, he focused on participatory planning research at the intersection of transportation, health, and environmental justice, working alongside Prof. Christopher Zegras and Prof. Erica Caple James. His graduate thesis evaluated the participatory planning processes of a World Bank-financed multimillion-dollar transportation investment in Lima, Perú, where he demonstrated the risk international development agencies run when overemphasizing financial cost-benefit analyses as opposed to social inclusion in project formulations.

Prior to MIT, Marco worked for six years in the tech industry, most recently as a strategic partnerships manager at Google, where he partnered with transit agencies to innovate their planning approach through innovative data analytics. Marco holds a BA in Urban Studies and Latin American Studies, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania and was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Peru. He is a native bilingual Spanish speaker, is fluent in Portuguese, and has worked and studied in México, Perú, Argentina, and Brazil.

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