Emily Barrett is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech, where her work focuses on the intersection of community-based geographic information systems (GIS), economic geography, and urban development.

Her latest research examines spatial inequities across U.S. cities, focusing on municipal budgets as pivotal sites of debate for economic democracy. As a dedicated community-based researcher, Barrett has a history of partnering with organizations like the Nashville People’s Budget Coalition and Stand Up Nashville. Through this work, she contributes to broad debates in urban planning, revealing how organizers are reimagining public finance to create more affordable cities.

She holds a Ph.D. in Community, Research and Action from Vanderbilt University and a master’s degree in Geography from the University of Kentucky.

Megan Conville is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of City and Regional Planning in the College of Design. Her research focuses on the sustainable social development of affordable housing through the lens of the tenant selection process. Megan recently completed an internship in the Department of Community Affairs in the City of Atlanta where she was able to see firsthand how policy and regulation impact low-income households. In her time at Georgia Tech, she has served as both a Graduate Research Assistant and a Graduate Teaching Assistant. She received the Georgia Institute of Technology President’s Fellowship for the 2020 – 21 academic year.

Megan received a Master’s degree in Global Economic Governance and Policy from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, and a Bachelor’s in Business Administration and International Business from Seattle University, where she graduated cum laude.

Advisor: Elora Raymond

Gregory F. Randolph is an Assistant Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning. His research examines how local economies and urbanization patterns are shaped by major 21st-century transitions—technological, energy, and demographic—with a focus on inequality. He is currently writing a book on agrarian-to-urban transformations in India, under contract with Oxford University Press. He is also a research lead for FutureWORKS, a five-year program on the future of work in the Global South funded by the International Development Research Centre (Canada), through which he is examining the impact of decarbonization on spatial inequalities.

In addition to his academic research, Professor Randolph works with both governmental and non-profit institutions in their efforts to create inclusive urban economies. A decade ago, he co-founded the Just Jobs Network, a non-profit institute based in New Delhi that advises governments across the Global South on labor and employment policies. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Kindred Futures, an Atlanta-based organization working to build collective wealth in Black communities in the American South. He has also served as a policy advisor to the Los Angeles City Council and consults with multilateral organizations such as the World Bank on issues of sustainable development.

Professor Randolph's research has been supported by a range of academic institutions and foundations: the International Development Research Centre (Canada), London School of Economics, Asian Development Bank, U.S. Departments of Education and State, USC Lusk Center, Solidarity Center, and German Marshall Fund. He has been awarded the Fulbright-Hays and Fulbright-Nehru research fellowships. His opinion writing has appeared in media outlets such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindustan Times, Indian Express, and The Jakarta Post.

Dr. Randolph obtained his PhD in urban planning and development from the University of Southern California and his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. He speaks Hindi and Bahasa Indonesia.

Yilun 'Elon' Zha is a planner, urban designer, and data scientist. As a Ph.D. student in urban design and Master’s student in statistics, Elon orients his research interest towards the quantitative analysis of urban (re)design and its role in environmental, economic, and social sustainability. His past experience includes a wide variety of urban design and planning practices in China and the United States. Currently, he is working with Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones on research exploring the strategies and unintended consequences of suburban retrofits. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in City Planning from Tongji University in 2016 and 2019, respectively. In 2018, he also obtained a double Master's degree of Urban Design from Georgia Tech.

Advisor: Ellen Dunham-Jones

Perry Yang is a Professor and Director of Eco Urban Lab of the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Perry’s work focuses on incorporating data analytics into urban design to improve ecological and energy performance of cities. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters in this area from 2009, including the book Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era that he co-edited and co-authored six chapters in 2020 by Elsevier. He co-edited a 2019 theme issue Urban Systems Design: From Science for Design to Design in Science in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, a prestigious journal in planning to explore new urban design research agenda and applications of emerging technologies, data analytics and urban automation to placemaking in the context of smart city movement. Beyond writing, Yang has been awarded more than ten prizes in international competitions continuously from 2005 in Asian cities, including the 2009 World Games Park at Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a project opened in July 2009 and featured by CNN as an “eco-friendly” venue. His urban design work was introduced in the January 2010 issue Ecological Urbanism at World Architecture (WA), a leading architecture journal by Tsinghua University. His recent design projects were shortlisted in the 2022 Asian Games Village in Hangzhou in 2017, the Musi River Revitalization at Hyderabad in 2018, and water town designs in China’s Yangtze River Delta region in 2020-2021 during the pandemic. From 2017 to 2023, he has been involved in smart city projects in Japan, including one of Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic sites at Urawa Misono, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Global Carbon Project (GCP). 

Yang is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo from 2022 to 2023, and a Visiting Scientist at CARES of the Cambridge University in Singapore in 2023. He served as the endowed Bayer Chair Professor of UNEP Institute at Tongji University from 2014 to 2018. Perry is also a faculty fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech from 2018. He has served as a board member of the International Urban Planning and Environment Association (UPE) from 2007. He is a scientific committee member of International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE) from 2015. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, he was a Fulbright Scholar and SPURS Fellow at MIT from 1999 to 2000, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the National University of Singapore from 2001 to 2008.

Meaghan McSorley is a Ph.D. student in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech and a research assistant in the Healthy Places Lab with Dr. Nisha Botchwey, and the Smart Sea Level Sensors (SSLS) project based in Savannah, GA. She is also a Georgia Tech Institute Fellow. Her research focuses on the “people side” of sustainability, and the question of how to plan for healthy, equitable, and thriving cities for all. Specifically, she is interested in the role of culture, history, and emotions in helping to develop just approaches to climate change issues that center on the margins and create space for imagining thriving futures. Prior to returning to graduate school, she also worked at an electronic medical records software company for four years in a variety of implementation and management roles. She holds degrees in urban & regional planning (MURP) and public health (MPH), both from the University of Minnesota; and in anthropology and French (BA) from Cornell University.

Advisor: Nisha Botchwey

Steven P. French is professor of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Institute of Technology. He joined Georgia Tech in 1992 as the director of the City Planning program and served in that position until August 1999. He was the director of the Center for Geographic Information Systems from 1997 through 2011. He served as associate dean for research for the College of Architecture (now the College of Design) from July 2009 through June 2013 and dean of the College of Design from July 2013-June 2021.

French’s teaching and research activities focus on sustainable urban development, land use planning, GIS applications, and natural hazard risk assessment. In addition to his administrative assignments, Professor French has regularly taught graduate courses in land use, planning, and GIS. He has graduated six Ph.D. students and advised more than 50 Masters students in City and Regional Planning. He has also served on numerous dissertation committees in Architecture, Civil Engineering, and Public Policy.

Over the past twenty-five years, French has been the principal investigator or co-principal investigator on more than seventy research projects. He has participated in a number of National Science Foundation projects dealing with flood and earthquake hazards and was the Social Science Thrust Leader for the Mid-America Earthquake Center, an NSF Engineering Research Center. He has extensive experience in building and managing multidisciplinary teams of social scientists, architects, engineers, and scientists. French is the author or co-author of more than 25 refereed journal articles and four books. He has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of the American Planning Association, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association and Earthquake Spectra.

French holds a Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to Georgia Tech, he taught for ten years at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo. In 1987-88, he served as the visiting professor of resources planning in the Civil Engineering Department at Stanford University. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners and an associate member of the American Institute of Architects.