Meet the Speakers

  • Ellen is Director of the Master of Science in Urban Design degree, an authority on sustainable suburban redevelopment, and a leading urbanist.

    Author of over 100 articles, she is co-author with June Williamson of the retrofitting suburbia book series documenting successful retrofits of aging big box stores, malls, and office parks into healthier and more sustainable places. Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs, (Wiley, 2009, 2011) received a PROSE award as the best architecture and urban planning book of 2009 and has been featured in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Harvard Business Review, NPR, PBS, TED and other prominent venues. Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges (Wiley, 2020) expands on the first book examining how new retrofits are helping communities disrupt automobile dependence, improve public health, support an aging population, leverage social capital for equity, compete for jobs, and add water and energy resilience.

    Ellen serves on several national boards and committees, is former Chair of the Board of the Congress for the New Urbanism, lectures widely and conducts community workshops. In both her teaching and research she focuses on helping communities address new challenges that they were never designed for – whether that’s through her unique database of successful suburban retrofits or studio classes on anticipating autonomous vehicles, coping with climate change or suburban blight. 

    She taught at UVA and MIT before joining Georgia Tech as Architecture Program Director from 2000-2009.

  • Jeff Rader is widely recognized for his work to incorporate comprehensive planning principles into major decisions in metropolitan Atlanta. In 2004, he was a member of Alex Garvin’s team for the Trust for Public Land’s landmark BeltLine “Emerald Necklace” study, which established linear parks connected by pathways as the Beltline’s driving land-use imperative.

    Recently retired after four terms as a DeKalb County commissioner, Jeff served before that as planning director at Georgia Regional Transportation Authority and vice president for transportation policy at the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. At the Chamber, he steered business leaders into adopting a strongly pro-transit and smart growth agenda. In private sector and public roles, and in elected office, his signature achievement has been to advance clear, inclusive public interests in response to challenges posed by rapid growth and a changing world.

    Jeff is a fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners, as well as a German Marshall Fund Fellow. He also has been named a Common Cause Democracy Award recipient and Citizen Action’s “Citizen of the Year.”

  • Eric Meyer is a Planning Coordinator with the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC). Eric advances ARC’s active transportation interests through regional planning, local planning assistance, fostering community of practice, and producing active transportation continuing education and training.

     Prior to joining the ARC, he served as Deputy City Manager of Development and Infrastructure for the City of Powder Springs. Eric spent seven years as Planning Division Manager for Cobb County Department of Transportation. His division oversaw the development of the Comprehensive Transportation Plan, the County Trails Master Plan, and other planning efforts.

     Eric Meyer has thirty years of policy, legislative, planning and design work experience. He served as the Director of Planning and Economic Development with the City of Ocean Springs following hurricane Katrina. Other work experience includes work at the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, the Regional Business Coalition, and Georgia Conservancy.

    He earned his B.S. Industrial Systems Engineering and M.S. Public Policy from the Georgia Institute of Technology (“Georgia Tech”).

  • Kevin Green has been an Atlanta resident for more than 30 years and has been working for much of that time to advance livability and economic opportunity in the region. Kevin has served as President and CEO of the Midtown Alliance since 2011. He was previously executive director of The Clean Air Campaign and vice president of environmental affairs with the Metro Atlanta Chamber, where he worked to implement initiatives to improve water resource stewardship, air quality, transportation and land use. Prior to that, he practiced law in Atlanta for 10 years. His litigation experience includes state and federal trial and appellate courts across the Southeast.

    He graduated from James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, Va., and holds a law degree from Emory University.

    Kevin has been named one of the ‘100 Most Influential Atlantans’ by the Atlanta Business Chronicle and among 50 ‘Notable Georgians’ by Georgia Trend Magazine. In his spare time, Kevin is a visual ‘artist’ (www.kevingreen.art) and a live and studio musician (drums).

  • Tejas Santanam serves as Research Engineer for Beep, where he leverages his experience working in transit research, primarily in a multimodal transit optimization context, in his work on fleet-scale routing and scheduling. He has also consulted for transit work in bus stop infrastructure, EV charging, and transit equity. While at Georgia Tech, Tejas designed and launched a microtransit service in Atlanta. He also serves as a Lecturer at Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, where he teaches Constraint Programming and Network Science courses.

    He holds a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering and Master of Science in Analytics from Georgia Tech.

  • Subhrajit “Subhro” Guhathakurta is Director of the Center for Spatial Planning Analytics and Visualization and Director of the new Interdisciplinary Master of Science in Urban Analytics program at Georgia Tech. He is also the immediate past Chair of the School of City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Tech.

    Prior to his appointments at Georgia Tech, he served as the Associate Director of the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning as well as a founding faculty member of the School of Sustainability at the Arizona State University. He Co-Edited the Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) from 2011 to 2015, and is serving on editorial boards of several leading planning journals including the Journal of American Planning Association. Prof. Guhathakurta has published widely in many planning domains including energy systems, urban heat, sustainable development, travel behavior, housing affordability, integrated urban models, built environment and health, and the use of geospatial technologies in urban planning.

    Prof. Guhathakurta is the past recipient of the Chester Rapkin Award for the best article in JPER. He was also awarded the Mercator Professorship by DFG (German National Science Foundation) to conduct research in the Technische Universität, Kaiserslautern, Germany.

    He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis at the University College London; the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore; the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane; and served as a high-end expert for the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

  • Ms. Debra Lam is the Managing Director of Smart Cities and Inclusive innovation for Georgia Tech, a newly created role to drive smart cities and urban innovation work across the university and beyond. 

    Prior to this, she served as Pittsburgh’s first ever Chief of Innovation & Performance where she oversaw all technology, sustainability, performance and innovation functions of city government. She crafted the city’s first strategic plan for innovation, Inclusive Innovation Roadmap. She has been a receipt of various awards, including one of the top 50 Women in Technology nationally. She has worked and lived in New York, the United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. 

    She is a graduate of Georgetown University and University of California, Berkeley.

  • Mike Alexander is the Chief Operating Officer of the Atlanta Regional Commission, managing the Community Development, Natural Resources, Research & Analytics, Transportation Planning, Mobility Services, Aging and Independence Services, Workforce Development, and Homeland Security Departments of the ARC.

    Mike has over 20 years of public policy experience focused on regional and local community planning. As the COO, he leads this multidisciplinary, professional staff in the fields of transportation planning, environmental planning, community and workforce development, economics, aging services, and demographic forecasting.

    He is a graduate of the ARC Regional Leadership Institute, Leadership DeKalb, and Leadership Atlanta. Originally from South Carolina, Mike attended Auburn University where he received a dual masters degree in Public Administration and Community Planning. He served as a Marine Infantryman in Desert Storm.

  • Hans K. Klein is Associate Professor in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His main area of research is Internet governance, especially as its relates to globalization. He also studies community media, especially public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access television, and political organizing using the Internet. Other research interests include US technology policy for large technical systems and theories of the social construction of technology.

    Klein directs Georgia Tech’s Internet and Public Policy Project (IP3). He is a partner in the Internet Governance Project, a collaboration with Syracuse University. He formerly chaired the board of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) and led its activities in Internet governance. Much of his policy research has an applied dimension, and he has worked with such organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the City of Atlanta, and Atlanta’s WRFG community radio station.

    Klein received a Ph.D. from MIT in 1996 in Political Science, an M.S. from MIT in 1993 in Technology and Policy, and a B.S.E. in 1983 from Princeton University in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has also studied at the Technical University of Munich and was a visiting researcher at the Ecole des Mines in Paris.

    Before pursuing an academic career Klein worked in the European software industry from 1983-1988, working for Siemens (Munich), Schlumberger (Paris), and Olivetti (Milan).