Donna Tabangin is a licensed architect and environmental planner with 23 years of experience in the applied sciences as a faculty of the School of Engineering and Architecture of Saint Louis University (SLU) in Baguio City, Philippines where she taught computer-aided design and geographic information systems in the graduate and undergraduate programs.
She was the officer-in-charge of the Engineering and Urban Planning Research Laboratory. She finished her bachelor’s degree in architecture at Saint Louis University and master’s degree in urban and regional planning at the University of the Philippines School of Urban and Regional Planning, Diliman, Quezon City.
She has obtained advanced professional certifications, such as Geographic Information Systems for Land Evaluation at the School of Earth Sciences in the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium; Communications and Technology for Disaster Management at the United States Telecommunications Training Institute in Washington DC; and Disaster Risk Reduction and Management at Coventry University, United Kingdom.
In 2016, after serving as a visiting researcher in Technology Entrepreneurship and Design at the University of California Berkeley, she founded the SLU Incubator for Research, Innovation and Business (SIRIB Center). The center has evolved to become a TechHub which includes a Digital Fabrication Laboratory (FabLab) and a technology business incubator. The TechHub is one of the first five tech hubs in the Philippines and its mission is to move technology-intimate researches/projects from the academe as well as from the community towards intellectual property protection, business mentoring, and commercialization. The hub is also involved in providing technical support to SMEs especially on product development, branding, and design.
She went into public service as the City Planning and Development Coordinator of the City Baguio in July 2020. She currently leads the office which is in charge of formulating development plans, comprehensive land use plans, project development and monitoring, urban master planning, and creative design for the city.