Leire is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s School of Design. She has taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design from 2010 to 2017, at London’s Architectural Association School of Architecture, Graduate School Landscape Urbanism Programme from 2004 to 2007 and at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning from 2006 till 2010.

While at the GSD, Leire was part of the leadership team for the Waste to Energy Group and was also design research lead for the Health and Places Initiative, a research collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health focused on studying the links between the built environment and health outcomes.  She has co-authored the book: Architecture and Waste: A (Re)Planned Obsolescence (2017, Actar) and Lifestyled: Health and Places (2016, Jovis).

Leire is a registered architect in Spain and studied architecture at the ETSASS (Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de San Sebastian) and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, UK.  Leire’s teaching and research focuses on resilience and sustainability through an engagement with emerging design approaches as well as novel technologies.  Her research spans between larger scales of engagement such as urban metabolisms as well as the relationships between health and place through to explorations in digital fabrication as well as tectonic prototyping.

Since 2002, Leire has been collaborating with David Syn Chee Mah as asensio_mah.  Their work has been exhibited internationally including at the Royal Academy of Art in London, The Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, The NGV Melbourne Design Week and has been featured in professional books and journals published by Birkhauser, Evolo, Lars Muller, Actar and Routledge amongst others.