With her partners at MASS, Marika co-founded an architectural nonprofit dedicated to designing well-built environments that aid in the reduction of global poverty. Marika was a lead designer on the Butaro Hospital project in northern Rwanda, where she lived on-site in 2008 developing the designs and overseeing construction. The hospital will be the first in a district of 400,000 people, employing all local workers; the project used local materials and innovative ventilation systems in its design to combat in-hospital TB transmission.

Marika's work with MASS has been dedicated to training the next generation of Rwandan design leaders through her work with interns from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology. Marika has received several awards for her work in reframing architects as change agents to combat global inequality. Marika was an invited Ideas Scholar at the Aspen Institute in 2009. She was a summer fellow at Public Architecture in 2007, and received a U.S. National Commission for UNESCO Traveling Fellowship in 2008. Marika received her BA in Urban Studies from Brown University, and her Masters of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.