Teaching

I teach courses in transportation, the environment, and data science in UCLA’s Urban Planning and Public Affairs programs.

I am often looking for undergraduate research assistants with strong skills in GIS and/or Python programming. Please send me a CV if you are interested. Please note that you must be a currently enrolled UCLA student.

Transportation and Environmental Issues

Graduate. Offered Winter 2022. Syllabus

This course critically analyzes policies to improve fuel economy, promote electric vehicles, and reduce vehicle travel. We examine the history and legal frameworks of environmental regulation, and consider analytical methods to quantify carbon emissions and estimate emission reductions. We focus on climate change, but also consider many of the other environmental consequences of transportation, from air pollution to stormwater runoff.

Urban Data Science

Graduate. Offered Spring 2022. Syllabus

New data sources are a potential goldmine for urban planners and policy makers. But sometimes they are large, sometimes they are messy, sometimes they are awkward to access, and often they are all of these things. In this hands-on course, we develop skills in scraping, processing, and managing urban data, and use tools such as natural language processing, geospatial analysis, and machine learning. We draw on examples from transit, housing, and equity planning, and build competence in open-source tools and languages such as Python and SQL. We also consider the limits to data science, and the biases and pitfalls that “big data” can entail.

Green Transportation

Undergraduate. Offered Winter 2022. Syllabus

This course provides an introduction to transportation planning and policy from the environmental perspective. We consider how urban transportation systems can encourage alternatives to the private car and reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. We examine innovations in transit planning, parking policy, and bicycle and pedestrian design, and consider the potential for new technologies such as autonomous vehicles.

Previous courses

Before joining UCLA, I taught Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz and Geography at McGill University. Here are links to previous syllabi.

• Environmental Policy and Economics
• Ecological Economics
• Green Cities
• Bicycle Planning
• Urban Field Studies

Prospective PhD students

I welcome expressions of interest from prospective PhD students with research ideas and interests that are broadly related to my work on urban sprawl, local environmental and climate policy, or transportation planning and policy. In general, I tend to work with students who have their own independent research interests, rather than recruiting for a specific project.

Please send me an email with the following information:

• Your research ideas and questions you’d like to work on (the more detail the better)
• Why you want to do a PhD and your ultimate career goals (briefly)
• Your current CV
• Your academic transcript (unofficial is fine) and other test scores if available
• Your last TOEFL score if English is not your first language

For general information about program requirements, funding and admissions, please consult the Department website.