People

RESEARCHERS

Rounaq Basu rounaq[at]mit.edu  

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning 2019
MIT CEE, MS in Transportation 2019
IIT Bombay, BTech in Civil Engineering 2016

Rounaq is a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. His research interests include land use-transport interactions, relationships between mobility and life outcomes, and urban long-term decision-making under uncertainty. He is particularly interested in the impact of emerging and new forms of urban mobility on travel behavior and metropolitan growth. He has previously consulted for the World Bank on public transit accessibility and integration with on-demand mobility in Latin American cities. At CFL, Rounaq is researching the synergies between pedestrian flows and the built environment.

Dylan Halpern  d_h[@]mit.edu  

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning 2020

Virginia Commonwealth University, BFA Graphic Design, 2015 

Dylan engages research topics centered on data visualization, mobility and commercial activity in cities, and analysis of built form. He comes from a background in visual communication and architecture, and affiliations include Fulbright Brazil (2017), Civic Data Design Lab (2018-2020), and Senseable City Lab (2020). His work has been featured in the Cooper Hewitt Museum (2018), the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), and the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2020). At CFL, Dylan is researching behavior and flows of people during COVID-19 and ways to effectively communicate insights.

Aziz Alhassan alhassan[at]mit.edu 

MIT CEE/CSE, PhD Candidate, Civil and Environmental Engineering/Computational Science and Engineering, 2022
MIT CCSE, Master of Science in Computation for Design and Optimization, 2017
King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, B.S. Computer Science, 2013

Aziz is an advocate for walkability, access and public transit in urban areas. His current research focuses on the design and analysis of walkable neighborhoods around transit stops, and promoting transit oriented development (TOD). Prior to MIT, Aziz worked as a public policy researcher at the Center for Complex Systems at KACST, covering topics in water infrastructure, labor market economics and renewable energy in Saudi Arabia.

Rubén G. Morgan rumorgan[at]mit.edu  

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning, 2021
MIT, Master of Science in Transportation, 2021
The Ohio State University, B.S. Civil Engineering, 2018

Rubén has broad research interests in transit fare policy and customer behavior. His research has identified rider behaviors through unsupervised learning approaches, estimated the risks and benefits to a transit agency of implementing a new fare product, conducted a marketing experiment on mobile ticket users, analyzed walking and biking catchments from commuter rail stations, and is currently analyzing commuter rail and corporate program ridership responses due to covid-19.

Anne Hudson awhudson[at]mit.edu  

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning 2020
MIT CEE, MS in Transportation 2020
Hamilton College, BA in German Literature, 2012

Annie’s research focuses on preparing cities for next-generation transportation technologies. Prior to her time at MIT, she worked as an energy policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC and as a policy consultant for urban mobility clients ranging from Zipcar to Zagster. AT CFL, Annie is researching how behavior and flows of people are changing during COVID-19.

Bahij Chancey bahij[at]mit.edu  

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning 2021

Yale University, BFA Architecture, 2013

Bahij is an advocate for sustainable, walkable, and bikeable cities, and hails from New York City. Prior to MIT, Bahij worked in architecture, city government, and nonprofit development at Green City Force, which operates a green job training program for public housing residents. At CFL, Bahij is researching pedestrian flow models and determinants in urban environments.

Kloe Ng  kloe[at]mit.edu  

New York University 2019, Applied Urban Science and Informatics. National University of Singapore 2015, Urban Planning.

Kloe’s research interest and focus lies in the nexus between urban planning, spatial data science and urban data analytics. Prior to joining the CFL, she was working for a Singapore-based urban consultancy delivering master planning projects all over the world from Philippines to Brazil.

Prathito Wisambodhi prathito[at]mit.edu

MIT DUSP, Master of City Planning, 2021
Bandung Institute of Technology, BA Architecture, 2014.

Thito is interested in research applying data science to the interaction between the informal economy and the built environment. Before coming to MIT, Thito worked in an urban consultancy firm in Singapore delivering urban design and master planning projects for private and government clients in the Asia Pacific and the Middle East.

jwoo[at]gsd.harvard.edu

GSD DDes, Urban Planning and Design, 2020. GSD MDes, Urbanism, Landscape, Ecology, 2016. Berlage Institute, Master of Architecture, 2011. 

Jung Hyun’s scholarly interests focus on accessibility, walkability, transit mobility, integrated land use and transportation planning, and TOD design. Her dissertation title is Accessibility Impact of Transit Development Areas in Seoul that has been granted by the Harvard Center for Geographical Analysis. Along with her practice, she worked with several international firms, including MVRDV, Relational Urbanism Office, and Perkins Eastman. She also taught urban design studios at the Berlage Institute in TU Delft and lectured in many different places.

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR

Andres Sevtsuk, PhD asevtsuk[at]mit.edu

 

Andres Sevtsuk is a Charles and Ann Spaulding Career Development Associate Professor of Urban Science and Planning at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he also leads the City Form Lab. His work bridges urban design with spatial analysis and urban technology. Andres is the author of the Urban Network Analysis toolbox, used by researchers and practitioners around the world to model pedestrian flows along city streets and to study coordinated land use and transportation development along networks. Applications of this work have led him to study business location choices in cities, particularly in the retail, food and service sector. He is currently publishing a book entitled “Street Commerce: The Hidden Structure of Retail Location Patterns and Vibrant Sidewalks” with Penn Press. Andres is also leading the Future of Streets research initiative, which investigates how cities could adapt their streets and mobility infrastructure to newly emerging transportation technologies in ways that maximize multi-modal, socially inclusive, and environmentally sustainable outcomes. Andres has collaborated with a number of city governments, international organizations, planning practices and developers on urban designs, plans and policies in both developed and rapidly developing urban environments, most recently including those in US, Indonesia, Estonia and Singapore. He has led various international research projects; exhibited his research at TEDx, the World Cities Summit and the Venice Biennale; and received the President’s Design Award in Singapore, International Buckminster Fuller Prize and Ron Brown/Fulbright Fellowship. Before joining MIT, Andres was an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an SMArchs in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT.

COLLABORATORS

Raul Kalvo  raul[at]inphysica.com

Tampere University of Technology, Estonian Academy of Arts.

Raul is an architect and computational designer. Prior of joining Tampere University of Technology as a researcher he founded computational design office Inphysica Technology Ltd and held a researcher position at City Form Lab in Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). His research topics ranged from fabrication methods to urban accessibility models. Raul Kalvo is currently lead developer for “Urban Network Analysis for Rhino” and “Grid Structure Fabrication toolset for Rhino”. Kalvo has been honored by Singapore President Design Award, best paper award at SimAUD and been multiple times nominee for EAIA Annual Prize in exhibition category. He has also worked as an architect for 3+1 Architect and a lecturer at Estonia Academy of Arts. He has lead workshops in numerous firms and institutions, such as RMIT (Melbourne), Foster and Partners (London), ARUP (London), Perkins+Will (UK), KPF (New York), SOM (New York), ETH (Zurich), EPFL (Lausanne), Advances in Architectural Geometry (London).

Reza Amin Darbari   r.a.darbari[at]gmail.com 

PhD North Carolina State University, MArch University of Michigan.

Reza completed his PhD in Design at North Carolina State University, with a co-major in Forestry and Environmental Resources (in the Geospatial Analytics concentration), and a minor in Statistics. His research interests include urban design, urban morphology, geospatial analytics, land change modeling, history of urban form, and in general, the relationship between city form and its environmental and socio-economic performances. His PhD dissertation is focused on developing a non-deterministic land-tax-based framework for land-use planning as an alternative to conventional zoning. Developing and using an agent-based land change model, his PhD research explores how the spatial distribution of land use and density changes under different land tax policies and design scenarios.
Prior to starting his PhD, Reza was a researcher at City Form Lab at Singapore University of Technology and Design, and MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning. At MIT DUSP, he collaborated on the Making the Clean Energy City in China project for developing a neighborhood scale Energy Proforma. During his time at City Form Lab, he collaborated on several projects, including the World Bank’s initiatives for establishing City Planning Labs in Indonesian Cities, and for Measuring Urban Expansion and Transformation in East Asia and Pacific Regions.

PAST RESEARCHERS

Kevin Chong (GSD), Matthew Schreiber (GSD), Alexander Mercuri (GSD), Jia Gu (GSD), Haibei Peng (GSD), Karen Stolzenberg (GSD), Onur Ekmekci (SUTD) , Lisa Sweeney (SUTD), Emily Royall (MIT/SUTD), Liqun Chen (MIT/SUTD), Lennard Ong (SUTD), Farré Nixon (MIT/SUTD), Michael Mekonnen (MIT).