LEADERSHIP

This interdisciplinary program is Co-Directed by Dr. Carol Atkinson-Palombo and Norman Garrick.

Carol Atkinson-Palombo Website

Dr. Carol Atkinson-Palombo is an Associate Professor in the University of Connecticut’s Department of Geography and the Director of UConn’s Environmental Studies program. Having trained for five years as a National Science Foundation IGERT scholar in Urban Ecology, her specialization is in collaborating with interdisciplinary teams to pursue use-inspired policy-relevant research.

She uses geographical techniques such as GIS-based spatial analysis, statistical modelling, and qualitative methods to assess the impact of policies intended to promote sustainable cities, and is particularly interested in transportation sustainability because of its connection to a wide array of societal concerns such as air pollution, land use, global climate change, and social and environmental equity.

An emerging area of interest is how autonomous vehicles may be deployed in various contexts and whether or not they will reinforce or replace public transportation. Dr. Atkinson-Palombo currently serves on the Task Force on Autonomous Vehicles for the State of Connecticut, a body charged with providing guidance on AV legislation.

Teaching specializations include courses on Sustainable Cities, Urban Geography, Sustainability, and a capstone focused on professional development for the Environmental Studies program that she directs. She engages in a wide range of service activities for the University, as well as national and international bodies, and has a deep and abiding commitment to equity and diversity.

Norman Garrick Website

Norman Garrick is a Professor Emeritus of Civil Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Garrick is also a former member of the national board of The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), co-chair of CNU’s Transportation Task Force and a CNU Fellow. He specializes in the planning and design of urban transportation systems, including transit, streets, street networks, parking, bicycle and pedestrian facilities. His research and writings have reached a wide audience through outlets such as The Washington Post, The Denver Post and The Hartford Courant, The Atlantic CityLab, Planetizen, New Urban News, Streetsblog, and Streetfilm.  In addition to his academic career, Dr. Garrick has worked as transportation consultant on numerous design charrettes including urban revitalization projects with the Prince of Wales Foundation in Kingston, Jamaica and in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Dr. Garrick is the recipient of the Transportation Research Board’s Wootan Award for Best Research Paper in policy and organization, and is a Fulbright Fellow.

 

FACULTY

Sara Bronin

Sara Bronin is the Thomas F. Gallivan Chair of Real Property Law, and faculty director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Law, at UConn Law School. She researches and publishes in the areas of property, land use, historic preservation, and renewable energy law. She has written several books and over a dozen scholarly articles, and she lectures nationally and internationally, on those topics. Through the American Law Institute, she is coordinating the land use volume of the forthcoming Fourth Restatement of Property. Among other public service positions, Sara chairs the City of Hartford Planning & Zoning Commission, serves as chair of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, and chairs the City of Hartford Energy Improvement District. She has degrees from Yale Law School (J.D.), the University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar) (M.Sc.), and the University of Texas (B.Arch./B.A.).

Peter Kochenburger

Peter Kochenburger is the Executive Director of the Insurance Law LL.M. Program, Deputy Director of the Insurance Law Center, and Associate Clinical Professor of Law at the University of Connecticut School of Law. He helps direct the Insurance Law LL.M. program and teaches courses in insurance law and regulation, including Principles of Insurance, Liability Insurance, and Comparative Insurance Regulation, which involves students and faculty from China, Europe and the United States. Professor Kochenburger also works in the area of new technologies and insurance, and is a member of the University’s Transportation Technology & Society Research Group. He has published in the areas of Liability Insurance and Gun Violence, Climate Change and Insurance, International Insurance Regulation, and Insurance Online and Consumer Protection. He is a funded Consumer Representative to the National Association of Insurance Commissioners and a consumer stakeholder with the International Association of Insurance Supervisors. Professor Kochenburger was elected to the American Law Institute in 2013; he graduated from Harvard Law School and holds his B.A. in history from Yale University.

Joseph A. MacDougald

Joseph A. MacDougald, Professor-In-Residence, Strasser Fellow in Environmental Law, is the Executive Director of UConn Law’s Center for Energy & Environmental Law (CEEL), the Director of the LLM in Energy & Environmental Law, and the faculty advisor to several doctoral students as well as the Energy & Environmental Law Society.

Professor MacDougald teaches and researches many aspects of environmental and energy law with a primary emphasis on climate change and its interaction with different levels of government. As an Executive Board member and Director of Applied Research with the Connecticut Institute for Resilience and Climate Adaptation, he has helped guide research projects exploring the legislative and policy responses to the threat of sea level rise. As a member of UConn’s Transportation Technology and Society Research Group, he has been engaged with how environmental and liability law and policies respond to the advent of autonomous vehicles. He has published works and given presentations on topics ranging from resilience policy and national security, sea level rise, climate change and insurance, the Clean Air Act and automobile emissions, and President Theodore Roosevelt’s environmental legacy.

Professor MacDougald received his BA in mathematics from Brown University, MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business, JD from University of Connecticut School of Law, and Masters in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He previously held a lecturer’s appointment to Yale University’s School of Forestry & Environmental Studies.

Kerry Marsh

Kerry L. Marsh (Ph.D. Ohio State University, MS Texas A & M University, BA University of Virginia) is Professor of Psychological Sciences at the University of Connecticut. From 2014 to 2016 she was a Visiting Scientist at the National Science Foundation, where she served as Program Director for the Social Psychology Program in the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate. She also served as an special domain Expert to NSF in January through December 2018. She conducts research at both the Storrs and Hartford campuses, teaches courses in the Social Psychology Graduate Training Program at Storrs, and teaches undergraduate courses at Hartford in Environmental Psychology, Social Psychology, and Principles of Research in Psychology.

As a social psychologist, Professor Marsh studies both traditional areas of social psychology such as motivated social cognition and attitudes,  as well as novel and emerging areas at the intersection of person-environment interactions, such as the dynamics of perceiving and acting in built environments. Her research involve conventional lab procedures as well as highly interdisciplinary teams using cutting-edge methods (e.g., motion tracking and dynamical systems analyses; virtual reality methods for studying interpersonal and environmental risk).  In the area of person-person-environment interactions, her research has covered diverse topics such as joint action and interpersonal synchrony, environmental perceptions, and navigating virtual environments during simulated emergencies. In the area of Transportation Technology & Society, Prof. Marsh has three projects underway, in collaboration with Andrew Tucker in Psyc Sciences. One project is on distracted driving, funded by Travelers Insurance. A second involves analyzing accidents caused by conversing with others in the car versus on the phone, using the Strategic Highway Research Program 2 (SHRP 2) database. A third project underway uses the UConn driving simulator to examines how conversing with others (present or on the phone) affects the handoff when drivers must shift from autonomous to nonautomous vehicle mode.

DAVIS CHACON HURTADO

Davis Chacon-Hurtado is Assistant Research Professor Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut.

Davis completed his PhD in Transportation and Infrastructure Systems at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in 2018. His dissertation looked at the role of transportation infrastructure on building economic resilience in the U.S. Great Lakes Regions. He grew up in Cusco, Perú where he obtained his B.S. in Civil Engineering at the University of San Antonio Abad of Cusco. He also earned an MSCE degree from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

His scholarship has appeared in the International Journal of Sustainable Transportation, Transportation Research Record, and the ASCE Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems. His research interests include the evaluation of transportation systems; transportation planning; economic resilience; environmental justice, equity, and human rights; GIS-based spatial analysis, and sustainable transportation planning in developing countries. In his free time, Davis enjoys traveling, hiking, and cooking with friends.

STUDENTS

 

YUNHE CUI

Yunhe is a second-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Geography, the University of Connecticut. Before joining UConn, she obtained a B.A. in GIS and a B.S in Geology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.S in Urban Informatics from New York University in 2018. Yunhe particularly interests in city growth problems and transportation-related problems in the city area. Her research interest includes transportation GIS, spatial data science and remote sensing-based urban land-use change. Yunhe loves hiking and camping with friends as well as with a group of geologists.

QUINN MOLLOY

Quinn is a second year PhD student in the University of Connecticut Geography department. Before joining the program, she worked as a GIS analyst and coordinator for five years in the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s planning office. During this time she led the Data & Analysis Team to improve the use of constructive techniques in data collection, management, and analysis for all modes of transportation. Her work has been featured in studies like the Massachusetts Commission on the Future of Transportation Report and the recent Congestion Report. Quinn hopes to engage in work that identifies the impacts of emerging technologies and promote the goal of a sustainable and equitable future in urban transportation systems. She has a degree in Geography from Keene State College and is an avid bike rider.

Taylor Price

Taylor is a first year PhD student in the Geography Department at UCONN. Most recently, Taylor earned his M.A. in Economics from The City College of New York (CCNY – CUNY). While obtaining his M.A., Taylor focused his research on the impact restrictive zoning has on housing prices. In his research, Taylor seeks to understand the impact that zoning and transportation policies have on built environments as well as their economic impacts. He hopes his research will contribute to the promotion of a more equal and environmentally conscious future. Taylor obtained a B.A. in International Relations and Economics at the University of California Davis. He enjoys hiking, traveling, reading, and visiting his home state of California.

GE SHI

Ge is a doctoral student in Civil Engineering, with a concentration in Transportation and Urban Engineering at the University of Connecticut. His interest area is all aspects regarding sustainable transportation, including but not limited to travel behavior, green transportation, bicyclist and pedestrian facilities, and sharing mobility. Before coming to the University of Connecticut, he was a research intern in World Resource Institute Beijing Office, where he did research on electronic vehicles policies, congestion charging, low emission zone and new climate economy in transportation. Ge got his Bachelor of Engineering degree at Chongqing Jiaotong University in China. He then obtained his Master of Science degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ge is a bike commuting nut and a basketball fan. He is interested in almost all aspects of the city while he dreams of living in the countryside all the time.

EMILY KAUFMAN

Emily Kaufman is fourth year undergraduate honors student at the University of Connecticut majoring in Environmental Studies and Sociology with a minor in Geographic Information Systems. Emily is particularly interested in the intersections between social justice and climate change. Her passions focus on redefining the unproductive and unequal system through collaborative education and policy change. In the summer of 2018, Emily traveled to Ecuador where she interned with the Social Entrepreneurship Corps and discovered her interest in Indigenous and minority voices in the climate movement. At UConn, she is currently the co-chair of the Sustainability Subcommittee under Undergraduate Student Government, a student representative for the University’s Environmental Policy Advisory Council, and a member of the General Education Environmental Literacy Task Force.

YVETTE OPPONG

Yvette Oppong is a senior at the University of Connecticut studying Environmental Studies on a pre-med track. Her focus is on the effects of environmental inequity and injustice on the health of minority populations in the United States. Based on the research that she conducted in the summer of 2018 at UConn Health, Yvette discovered there is a lack of doctors who understand the impact of social injustice on the health of their patients who enter their offices. A 15 minute doctor’s appointment is not able to properly treat the issues of a patient because there are outside influences that cannot be treated in that short-time span.

ALUMNI

Anaka Maher

Anaka Maher was an undergraduate student in Civil Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Her interests lie in equitable transportation systems and livable, affordable communities. She is minoring in Geography, Urban and Community Studies, and Mathematics. Anaka has been working on research on rideshare services in New York City by finding spatial and temporal patterns in large trip datasets to understand how this service is being used. She is now a master student at University of California, Berkeley.

LAUREN ROMEO

Lauren Romeo was an undergraduate researcher at TTS. She is now Graduate Transportation Planner at Arup. Lauren Romeo is a senior completing a dual degree in Civil Engineering and Economics. She is primarily interested in how transportation functions as the backbone of society and working to make current transportation systems more efficient, equitable, and environmentally friendly. Through her undergraduate research involvement and future career, she hopes to improve access in transportation and further the creation of multimodal systems that will help transition society away from auto dependence. Lauren has previously studied sustainable practices in Amsterdam, with a particular focus on the bike networks, under the direction of Dr. Atkinson-Palombo and Dr. Garrick. In her free time, Lauren enjoys painting and traveling.

ROSALIE SINGERMAN RAY

Rosalie Singerman Ray was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at TTS. Rosalie is now Assistant Professor of Geography at Texas State University – San Marcos.

Rosalie Singerman Ray is a recent PhD graduate from the Urban Planning program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. Rosalie’s dissertation analyzed bus lane network expansion in London and Paris to illustrate the institutional changes needed to shift toward just, sustainable transport, finding that empowered but not autonomous local governments played a central role in shaping roadspace allocation. While completing her dissertation, she was a visiting fellow at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics at SciencesPo in Spring 2019 through the Alliance Français program. Her past research has explored the effects of transit construction on local businesses and community displacement, documented how city transportation departments and transit agencies collaborate to prioritize buses, and assessed the prospect of fare-free transit in the United States.