Rebecca J. Walter is an Associate Professor and Windermere Endowed Chair in the Runstad Department of Real Estate in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Dr. Walter’s research is focused on policy innovation in low-income housing. She emphasizes a spatial analytical approach to examine how housing policies either expand opportunity or perpetuate inequality for low-income households. Most of her work is applied as it involves direct engagement with public housing authorities and non-profit housing providers. Dr. Walter also collaborates with criminologists to study spatial-temporal crime patterns across various types of land uses, housing developments, and commercial real estate. She examines real estate and urban planning variables (e.g., private investment, community and economic development initiatives, vacant lots, business activity) and changes in crime over time at the micro-scale (properties and street segments) to help inform policies that support the greatest crime reduction benefits.
Research Theme: Data Science & Spatial Analysis
Data-driven methodologies like GIS and remote sensing, as well as “big data”, artificial intelligence, and other methods of scholarship rooted in analyzing large datasets
Monica Huang
Monica Huang is a research engineer for the Carbon Leadership Forum at the University of Washington with expertise in environmental life cycle assessment (LCA). Recent research topics include the environmental impact of housing, optimizing tall wood structures, and developing data on the environmental impact of earthquake damage. She was also the lead author for a guide on the use of LCA in design and construction practice. Past research experience includes diverse topics such as astronomy, electronic waste, and sea level rise. As a graduate student, she developed the Port of Seattle’s first study on the impacts of sea level rise on seaport structures.
Ahmed Abdel-Aziz
Aziz is an Associate Professor with the Department of Construction Management and Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Aziz is known for his experience in the public-private partnership (PPP) alternative project delivery system; he has participated in committees, given presentations and talks, wrote book chapters, and published technical articles in leading academic journals in the USA, Canada, and the UK. Along with PPP, and with experience in construction project management, Aziz teaches project planning, scheduling, and control, Primavera and MS Project, estimating, life-cycle cost modeling for project economics, and quantitative risk analysis techniques. Aziz holds the UW honor of being a P. D. Koon Endowed Professor of Construction Management. He also works as Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Civil Engineers.
Philip Hurvitz
Phil Hurvitz is a research scientist with a primary appointment in the UW Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology, and is an Affiliate Associate Professor in Urban Design & Planning in the University of Washington College of Built Environments Urban Form Lab. He received his PhD in 2010, and has been on the faculty since 2012. He specializes in the objective measurement and analysis of the built environment using GIScience methodology. His current research investigates the relationship between health-related behaviors and built environment at fine spatial and temporal scales. Using new-generation devices that measure activity and location in real time, the data are being used to find associations between the types of activities people engage in and the types of environments people use as they go about their daily lives. He collaborates with researchers specializing in nutritional epidemiology, exercise physiology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology for the purpose of understanding the relationships between built environment, diet, and physical activity. Phil received a Master of Forest Resources degree in 1994 at the UW College of Forest Resources where he helped develop and implement a GIS for the Makah Indian Nation. His Bachelor’s degree (1983) is from Seattle University in Humanities. Prior to his current appointment, he worked as a GIS specialist for the College of Forest Resources, the City of SeaTac, the Seattle Water Department, and an instructor at the University of Washington and Green River Community College.
Rachel Berney
Berney’s primary interests include community sustainable design and development in an international context; urban design and planning history and theory with an emphasis on social and environmental factors; and qualitative and quantitative research methods for evaluating the efficacy of urban form, including challenges of cross-cultural research. Specifically, she focuses on the history and contemporary conditions of urbanism and development in the Americas, with an emphasis on public space and the public realm. In particular, she examines the narrative roles that built landscapes play in: politics and society, ecology, and human health and well-being. Thus, first, her work on pedagogical urbanism in Latin America and the United States examines the use of public space to front city regeneration projects. Second, her work on visible ecology critiques and directs the development of eco-literacy in community design and development practices. Finally, her work on human health and well-being is currently being developed through her Mobile Cities project centered on public space investment and community mobility planning in metro transit station projects. These themes are linked by a focus on understanding, reading, critiquing, and modifying narratives in the built environment. Of particular interest is the concept of legibility, or comprehensibility, and whether legible environments are capable of shaping sustainable urban places, practices, and policies.
Christine Bae
Christine Bae is an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington, Seattle. She received her Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Southern California. Her primary areas of interest are transportation and the environment; land use, growth management and urban sprawl; urban regeneration; environmental equity and justice; and international planning and globalization. She recently co-authored an article on measuring pedestrian exposure to PM2.5 in the Seattle, Washington, International District. She teaches a course “Mega City Planning”, in which she leads a group of students to Seoul, South Korea for two weeks in spring quarter. She is currently the West Representative for the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, and a Board Member for the Western Regional Science Association. She is also the recipient of an on-going Sea Grant for The Economic and Environmental Impacts of Moorage Marinas in the West Coast.
Marina Alberti
Marina Alberti is Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the Department of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington. She is Director of the Urban Ecology Research Lab and PI of the NSF Funded Research Collaboration Networks on Urban Eco-Evolutionary Dynamics. She teaches courses in Urban Science, Urban Ecology, Environmental Planning, Research Design, Geographic Information Systems, and Group Dynamic and Conflict resolution. Alberti’s research interests are in urban ecology and evolution. Her studies focus on the interactions between urban patterns and ecosystem function, urban signatures of evolutionary change, and the properties of cities that enhance their resilience and transformative capacity. She also leads research on urban ecological modeling, scenario planning, and urban ecological metrics to monitor progress and inform policy-making and planning. In her book Cities That Think like Planets (UW Press 2016), Alberti advances a science of cities that work on a planetary scale and link unpredictable dynamics to the potential for socio-ecological innovation.
Gundula Proksch
Gundula Proksch is a scholar, licensed architect, and Professor in the Department of Architecture and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She is the Founding Director of the Circular City + Living Systems Lab (CCLS), an interdisciplinary research group investigating transformative strategies for sustainable urban futures. The CCLS leverages research and design methods to investigate the potential of synergetic systems to apply circular economy principles and integrate living systems in buildings and cities. These approaches produce and circulate resources within the food-water-energy nexus toward efficient, just, and sustainable urban built environments.
Professor Proksch is the Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project “Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: CITYFOOD.” As part of an international research consortium, with partners in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Brazil, CITYFOOD investigates the potential of integration of aquaponic systems into cities on a broad scale, as an innovative solution to mitigate daunting environmental, economic, and social challenges. Her book Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design (Routledge, 2017) is the first source book on how to approach urban agriculture from a systems perspective. It explores the ways urban farms provide integrated environmental systems, innovative operational strategies, and design approaches to create environmentally sound and economically viable urban agricultural operations.
Professor Proksch’s interdisciplinary sustainability research builds on her professional experience spanning fifteen years of practice in Europe and the United States. She practiced with renowned architects, David Chipperfield in London and Richard Meier, Stan Allen and Roger Duffy of SOM in New York. She holds a Master of Architecture from Cornell University and a master-level degree from the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany. She received a DAAD scholarship for independent studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Carrie Sturts Dossick
Professor Carrie Sturts Dossick, P.E. is a Professor of Construction Management and the Associate Dean of Research in the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. Dr. Dossick also holds an adjunct professor appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is currently the Vice-Chair of the National BIM Standard -US Planning Committee. Dr. Dossick co-directs the Communication, Technology, and Organizational Practices lab in the Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC). Dr. Dossick has over two decades of research and teaching experience focused on emerging collaboration methods and technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM). She is an active member of the National Institute of Building Sciences BIM Council, and the Academic Interoperability Coalition (AiC). Current research and teaching projects include Cybersecurity for Large Institutional owners, a Pankow funded project on Owner Decision-making and Project Delivery, The Core BIM Module for the National BIM Standard US, an Introduction to BIM for Construction Management Certificate with Skanska, a new online Certificate for digital fabrication workflows for concrete formwork with Turner Construction, and the IB Index with the University of Technology Sydney. Recent work includes BIM-based information exchange between design, construction and operations, BIM Standards and Processes for the Port of Seattle, the use of Virtual Reality for Facilities Management Training, and BIM workflows for Preconstruction Services. Recent Technical Publications. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Education, General Services Administration, Mechanical Contractors Association of Western Washington, Sound Transit, Skanska USA Building, Mortenson Company, University of Washington Royalty Research Fund, University of Washington Capital Projects and Facilities services.