Melinda Benkő urbanist architect. She graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (1994), she is a DLA-scholarship holder (1996-1999), and until 2012, won several architectural competitions (Archimago Ltd.). She has been teaching architecture at the Faculty of Architecture of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics since 1992. Between 1995 and 2004 she taught landscape architecture at the former University of Horticulture (now MATE), and since 2023, she has been a guest lecturer at the M1 design studio at MOME, and a member of the MA degree panel. Since 2000, she has been employed at the Department of Urban Studies at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and later became Head of the Department (2012-2019). She obtained her PhD in 2006, has been a PhD thesis supervisor since 2008 and habilitated at BME in 2017. As a Campus France (Marseille 1990-1991, 2013, 2024), Tempus (Milan 1993), Hungarian Academy of Sciences Bolyai (2009-2016) and Fulbright (Chicago 2020) scholarship holder, she collaborates with several European architecture schools in the fields of education and research. She has been an elected member of the Scientific Committee on Architecture of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2011, from 2021, she is the head of the Standing Committee on Urban Studies, and since 2024, she has been a non-academic member of the Assembly.

Her teaching and research is focused on understanding the relationships between building and city, urban shapes and usage of space, outdoors and indoor spaces, closed and open spaces, etc., and she is particularly interested in the reassessment and re-use of post-socialist urban heritage. Since 2015, she has been the organiser of the DOCONF Facing Post-Socialist Urban Heritage International Doctoral Conference.