Mert Akay is a PhD Researcher at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft, and a Visiting Researcher at the MIT Senseable City Lab. His research sits at the intersection of urban morphology, urban data science, and machine anthropology, with a focus on urban climate adaptation. His PhD investigates multi-scale urban heat inequalities by integrating large-scale morphological and climate data with lived experiences, using novel machine learning methods to bridge big data with thick data. His work has been funded by research grants from the TU Delft Climate Action Programme and the TU Delft-IIT Delhi collaborative research initiative, and has been published in Building and Environment, Urban Design International, and Habitat International.