Dr. Julie Cidell is a Professor of Geography & Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She studies how local governments and individual actors matter in struggles over large-scale infrastructure and policy development and the corresponding urban environments that are produced. Her areas of study have included airports, railroads, and logistics hubs as well as green buildings and urban sustainability policies. Her book Imagining Sustainability (Routledge) compares Chicago and Melbourne in terms of how actors in each city conceptualize and imagine the environment and what difference that makes to their policies and programs. She is currently editing A Research Agenda for Transport Equity and Justice (Edward Elgar) and is an associate editor for the Journal of Transport Geography and a co-editor of Mobilities. She teaches on urban geography, transportation and sustainability, and mobility justice, as encapsulated in her textbook, An Introduction to Transportation Geography: Transport, Mobility, and Place (Rowman & Littlefield).

Andrea Pimentel Rivera is a Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in Geography. Originally from Puerto Rico, her research interests center on governance issues and their impacts on the mobility of people across modes on the island. Her master’s thesis research was a case study on the governance practices for the maritime transportation system servicing the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. She is currently a research assistant for Dr. Cidell for the project ‘Utilizing Arts and Culture to Mitigate the Negative Impacts of Transportation Infrastructure on Communities’.

Matt Hiett has worked at the Construction Engineering Research Laboratory (CERL) since 2012. He holds a B.A. in Geography and History from Augustana College in Rock Island and a Masters of Urban Planning from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). His recent work at CERL focuses on using spatial analyses to enhance site selection and assessment for a range of Army missions. He has also been involved in creating and deploying tools for the remote assessment of critical transportation infrastructure to inform mission planning processes. Matt is currently pursuing a PhD in geography at UIUC exploring urban morphology and its relation to non-physical conceptions of space to enhance the Army’s understanding of complex urban environments.

Wataru Morioka is a postdoc in the Department of Geography and GIScience. His research interests include GIScience, spatial analysis, and applications of GIS methods in environmental health, business marketing, and local history. He has been developing analytical methods to get a better understanding of geospatial phenomena, especially in urban environments or network-constrained spaces. He is now working as a research assistant on Dr. Cidell’s research project, “Railyards and Environmental Justice in Chicago”.

Cayden Schroeder is an undergraduate student majoring in Civil Engineering with an emphasis on transportation technology. He is also pursuing a minor in Urban Planning and Studies. Cayden is currently working alongside Jason Segal & Dr. Cidell to analyze the distribution of freight facilities within major metropolitan areas in the United States. Some of Cayden’s areas of interest include the relationship between zoning regulations and the built environment, as well as the efficiency of passenger transportation networks.

Jason Segal is an undergraduate student in the Department of Geography & GIS and is double majoring in Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He enjoys learning about the world and understanding why things happen where they do. He has experience volunteering with an emergency management agency and is in various student leadership roles across campus. He is also currently working as a research assistant on the freight recentralization research project.

Jinzhe Wang is an undergraduate student in the Department of Geography & GIS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. With a deep interest in urban formations and environmental studies, she enjoys using analytical methods to investigate the interplay between cities and the world. Alongside her studies, she has also worked as a class assistant in the Computer Science department, where she merges her passion for geography with the intricate world of computational analysis. She is now working as a research assistant on Dr.Cidell’s research project on railyard redevelopment and environmental justice.