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ABOUT ME   (Download CV)

(Please note, this website is only occasionally updated, more recent research updates can be found at the website of the Mobility Futures Collaborative).

Photo by Dominick Reuter

Photo by Dominick Reuter

How can we enhance mobility’s contribution to human development while reducing or eliminating the negative impacts that modern mobility systems impose on us, our ecosystems, and future generations?

That is, how can we design and develop mobility systems that contribute to sustainable places?

My work focuses on three broad, inter-related areas critical to answering this question:

(1) improving our understanding of the dynamic relationships between human behavior and the built, social, and natural environments;

(2) devising and demonstrating new planning approaches, with the goal of producing more robust strategies for sustainability in the face of uncertainty; and

(3) identifying viable pathways, through the complex institutional settings of the modern metropolis, to implement change.

Increasingly as part of the above work, I explore the role of mobile communication and computation technologies as a new data source for estimating and validating models, as a tool for changing behaviors within the mobility system itself, and as a way to improve citizen engagement in planning processes.

I teach classes on integrated land use-transportation planning, quantitative methods, and transportation finance. I also teach field-based planning workshops and studios, in places like Beijing, Boston, Santiago de Chile, Mexico City, and Cartagena, Colombia. I been a member of the Executive Board of the BRT Centre of Excellence since its inception and was recently appointed Lead Principal Investigator for Phase II of the Future Urban Mobility interdisciplinary research group in Singapore. I am MIT-side Lead of Transportation Systems under the MIT Portugal Program and serve on the Faculty Advisory Council of Transportation@MIT. At MIT, I founded the Mobility Futures Collaborative, a research group that leverages various analog and digital data collection and analysis tools to mobilize a collective intelligence towards improved mobility conditions in a range of contexts around the world.

I have consulted widely for a diverse range of organizations, including the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian, German, US, and Peruvian Governments, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Center for Regional Development. Prior to becoming a Professor, I worked for the International Institute for Energy Conservation in Washington, DC and Santiago de Chile and for MIT’s Laboratory for Energy and the Environment.  Currently, I am a member of the Editorial Board of the journals Transport Policy and the International Journal of Sustainable Transport.

I have a BA in Economics and Spanish from Tufts University, a Master in City Planning and a Master of Science in Transportation from MIT and a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning, also from MIT.

If you’ve made it this far, maybe you’d like to have a look at a profile done by MIT News in Sept, 2012, which included this video: