Sybil Derrible is the author of The Infrastructure Book: How Cities Work and Power Our Lives (Prometheus Books 2025) and Urban Engineering for Sustainability (MIT Press 2019). He is a Professor of Urban Engineering and the Director of the Complex and Sustainable Urban Networks (CSUN) Laboratory at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
As a world-renowned scholar on infrastructure, Derrible is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and Lead Author of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) Seventh Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) report. His books have been adopted or suggested as recommended reading by
university programs worldwide, including the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta, GA), the University of Waterloo (Canada), and Korea University (Seoul).
From Singapore to London to Boston, he is regularly invited to give talks, seminars, and keynotes. He is also regularly interviewed by podcasters and journalists. In 2018, he was invited to give a TEDx talk on The Power of Planning Cities.
According to Elsevier, Derrible is in the top 2% in his field for single-year impact in 2019 and in the list of top 2% for career-long productivity. He has published over one hundred scientific publications.
Originally from Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France-owned overseas territory of the coast of Atlantic Canada and the U.S.), Derrible studied at Imperial College London, the Ecole Centrale of Lyon, and the University of Toronto. He worked at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) before joining UIC.
He lives in Chicago with his family.
You can learn more about Sybil Derrible by following him on LinkedIn and Bluesky, and by visiting his website and subscribing to his mailing list: https://sybilderrible.com/.