Accepting PhD students

Matthew Palm is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill.

Dr. Palm welcomes opportunities to co-create new knowledge or advocacy with community partners. If you are an advocate, organizer, or NGO please reach out at any time.

Transportation infrastructure investments inevitably benefit some people more than others, with the “winners” of investments varying from project to project and city to city.  Similarly, transportation planning can harm communities by introducing new negative externalities, such a new highway’s air pollution raising asthma incidents in adjacent neighborhoods. Matthew Palm studies how transportation planning impacts people and society, including how those impacts are distributed across the population. His work aims to help planners design systems that enable society to flourish, without the negative impacts of those systems falling on communities that have historically benefited the least.

Barriers in the transportation system can prevent people from participating in essential activities, like doctors’ visits or school. This comes at a cost to both the traveler and society. Matthew’s work also examines how the removal of mobility barriers can increase residents’ social and economic participation. He aims to document how removing such barriers creates spillover benefits in other policy domains like healthcare and education.

Finally, Matthew is currently measuring how working nights and evenings impacts the travel behavior of shift workers and their families.   He asks what challenges shift workers face and how planning can better support the essential workforce of our 24-hour economy.

Matthew is the academic lead of the Innovative Pilots and Policies working group of Mobilizing Justice, a research partnership committed to advancing transportation equity in Canada. He has published past research on affordable housing and transportation topics in the U.S.A., Canada, and Australia.

In the News

Shift workers need ‘transportation justice,’ better service.

Newest Episode: Transportation Justice – 24HourNation

$1.09 Billion Grant reflects North Carolina’s Renewed Interest in Rail

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Ashley Hernandez is an Assistant Professor (CRP Founders Fellow) in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UNC Chapel Hill.

Before coming to UNC Chapel Hill, she was a researcher in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine. She studies and teaches on topics of housing and community development, urban inequality, social movements, and race. Her dissertation is an ethnographic investigation on anti-gentrification activism and community-based organizations across the political spectrum in East Los Angeles. Her work explores how the Latinx community in East Los Angeles struggles to shape neighborhood change and formulate a Latinx right to the city, as well as the ways their larger calls to action and tactics reverberate to other neighborhoods experiencing gentrification across the United States. She is a Eugene Cota Robles Fellow and a 2020-2021 Haynes Lindley Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. She has presented her work and methodologies at the Institute of Economic Development in Delhi, India and the Laboratoire D’Urbanisme in Paris, France. She co-authored and published a report for the California Endowment titled Increasing Community Power and Health Through Community Land Trusts: A Report from Five Grassroots CLTs to illuminate the ways in which five historically black and brown communities across California were responding to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis in their respective neighborhoods. Ashley is deeply committed to studying urban inequality and working with underrepresented communities and their struggles against displacement.

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Accepting PhD students

Matthew Bhagat-Conway is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning. His research interests are in travel behavior, urban transportation, and statistical methods for transportation data analysis. He is also jointly appointed in the Odum Institute for Research in the Social Sciences, where he is available to assist researchers with statistics and data analysis.

Dr. Bhagat-Conway has a PhD and MA in Geography from Arizona State University, and a BA in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to graduate school, he was a software developer and project manager for Conveyal, a public transport planning consulting firm, and a fellow in the Data Science for Social Good fellowship at the University of Chicago.

In the News

Improvements in California rush-hour traffic after COVID-19 pandemic

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Affiliations: Odum Institute ‏

Dr. Planey is an economic development specialist and educator at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His research interests focus on the economic geography of regional governance: How coordination around infrastructure and economic change creates new pressures and policy needs for North American city-regions.

There are multiple branches of his research project: Firstly, explaining the statecraft process in constructing public-private-civic alliances dedicated to bolstering metropolitan capacity for regional planning and city-region building.  Secondly, the role that different approaches to economic and policy analysis take in building arguments and political leverage on behalf of the regional statecraft process.  Finally, examining the role of social inclusion and exclusion in the formulation of regional economic development projects.  In all three branches of his research, the political interaction between different spatial scales of government, and the role of civic organizations in brokering the regional coordination process, are major research foci.

Recently, Donald Planey has published about these topics in the journals Territory, Politics, Governance and the Journal of Planning Education and Research.

Donald Planey is a Teaching Assistant Professor at UNC Chapel Hill Department of City and Regional Planning. He joined the department in 2020 as a postdoctoral fellow.  He graduated from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign with a PhD in Economic Geography.  He has written policy briefs on manufacturing development for the Chaddick Institute of DePaul University and the Alliance for Regional Development in Chicago, IL.

IN THE NEWS

Carolina Tracker: A Resource for Recovery

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Accepting PhD students

Miyuki Hino is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and an adjunct assistant professor in the Environment, Ecology, and Energy Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research examines the linkages between climate hazards, governance, and public policy to drive effective and equitable adaptation to climate change. Recent work has focused on the impacts of sea level rise, the effects of flood risk on property markets, and the use of managed retreat in adapting to climate change. Miyuki received a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources from Stanford University and a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Yale University.

IN THE NEWS

Sustainable Development and Natural Hazards: A Conversation with Miyuki Hino

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies, Environment – Ecology & Energy Program (E3P)

Dr. Dale Whittington is a Professor of Environmental Sciences & Engineering, City & Regional Planning, and Public Policy, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1986, he has worked for the World Bank and other international agencies on the development and application of techniques for estimating the economic value of environmental resources in developing countries, with a particular focus on water and sanitation and vaccine policy issues. He has designed and carried out valuation studies in Haiti, Guatemala, Mexico, Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, Pakistan, Nepal, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.

His current research focuses on the following four areas: 1) the development of planning approaches and methods for the design of improved water and sanitation systems for the rapidly growing cities of Asia, 2) the design of municipal water tariffs in developing countries, 3) estimating the economic benefits of vaccines for malaria, typhoid, cholera, and HIV/AIDS, and 4) Nile water management issues. Dr. Whittington is the author (with Prof. Duncan MacRae) of a graduate textbook on public policy analysis, Expert Advice for Policy Choice.

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Accepting PhD students

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies

Dr. Allie Thomas studies how best practices travel the globe and where they land. She uses ethnographic research methods to understand how “best practices” in transportation are adopted (or not) in developing economies, such as China, focusing on planners. Her US-based work focuses on electric bicycles and family travel. She is semi-fluent in Mandarin Chinese and has extensive experience living in China.

Transportation “best practices” travel the globe

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Accepting PhD students

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies, 1

Dr. Danielle Spurlock’s work focuses on plan and policy implementation and addresses policy questions in the areas of planning, public health, environmental and social justice, and dispute resolution. Her research explores the relationships among land use, the environment, human behavior, and structural inequality on a variety of research projects including: social stratification and its impact of the siting of hazardous land uses; social vulnerability and emergency preparedness; and the impact of land use decisions on ecosystems services. Dr. Spurlock’s most recent research investigates plan and policy implementation and the land use decision-making process at the parcel level.

IN THE NEWS

Recognized as a Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar

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Affiliations: Center for Urban and Regional Studies