Chendi Zhang

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Chendi Zhang (she/her/hers) is a doctoral student in Urban Planning at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. Her research interests include age-friendly public space, participation and community engagement, urban design, smart city and technologies, and Urban China.

Prior to pursuing her PhD, Chendi was a landscape designer at OLIN, Philadelphia, assisted in curating Penn-China Design Dialogue 2019, worked on Beautiful China – Reflections on Landscape Architecture in Contemporary China as an assistant editor and book designer, and started to share tutorials about landscape architecture and her experience as an international student in design and planning major as a social media influencer.

Chendi studied and worked in the field of landscape architecture for ten years, holding her master’s degree in Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and bachelor’s degree of Science in Landscape Architecture from Beijing Forestry University. With her research concentration, practice experience, and design background, Chendi studies urban issues from a perspective of how planning and design processes can collaborate more tightly and efficiently to better respond to the demands of overlooked and misrepresented vulnerable groups and reduce spatial inequality in the built environment.

Website: chendizest.com

Megan Mullin

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Megan Mullin is Professor of Public Policy and holds the Luskin Endowed Chair in Innovation and Sustainability at UCLA. She is Faculty Director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, which partners with civic leaders on research to advance equitable public policy addressing environmental challenges.

Mullin is a political scientist whose research examines how coordination problems, accountability failure, and inequality in environmental risks and benefits shape political response to environmental change. Recent projects focus on the governance and finance of urban water services, public opinion about climate change, and the local politics of climate adaptation. She also has published on federalism, election rules and voter turnout, and local and state institutional design.

Mullin’s work has appeared in Nature, Science, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, and other journals in political science, public administration, and planning. She is the recipient of five awards from the American Political Science Association, including the Lynton Keith Caldwell Award for her book, Governing the Tap: Special District Governance and the New Local Politics of Water (MIT Press, 2009). Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Geological Survey, and private foundations. She works regularly with policy makers, and her research and commentary have appeared in many national and international media outlets. In 2020, she was named an Andrew Carnegie Fellow.

Mullin received her Ph.D. in political science from the University of California, Berkeley. She served on the faculties at Temple University and Duke University prior to joining UCLA in 2023.

Siddharth Kara

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Siddharth Kara is an author, researcher and activist on modern slavery. Over the past two decades, Kara has conducted ground research in more than 50 countries to personally document the cases of several thousand slaves and child laborers.

In addition to several academic reports and journal articles, Kara has published three books with Columbia University Press: “Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery” (2008); “Bonded Labor: Tackling the System of Slavery in South Asia” (2012); and “Modern Slavery: A Global Perspective” (2017). “Sex Trafficking” earned the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded to the best book written in English on slavery or abolition, and was later turned into the Hollywood movie “Trafficked.”

Courtney Demko

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Dr. Demko’s research focuses on older adult health and well-being. She is particularly interested in Alzheimer’s caregiver burden. Her research involves using national survey data and focuses on the multidimensional factors associated with caregiver burden among young adult caregivers.

Dr. Demko’s research experience includes both quantitative and qualitative methodologies and she has used her research skills on several grant-funded research projects at UCLA including grants from the Ford Foundation and Archstone Foundation. She was a member of the UCLA Latino Economic Security (LES) team, which researches the economic impact of a nation growing older and more diverse. Dr. Demko served as the Project Director for the team’s latest project which included conducting focus groups and surveying older white conservative adults to understand their attitudes and beliefs toward immigration and immigration policy. She has published her work in peer-reviewed journals such as The Journal of the American Society on Aging.  She also gained administrative and managerial experience as the Assistant Director for the Center for Policy Research on Aging at UCLA’s Department of Social Welfare and Public Policy.

Dr. Demko also has several years of teaching experience. She is currently teaching 211A Human Behavior in the Social Environment and 260A Research Capstone at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs Department of Social Welfare. She has also taught at California State University Los Angeles School of Social Work teaching both graduate and undergraduate Social Work Research Methods and Statistics courses.  Her teaching philosophy includes using a variety of teaching modalities to be inclusive of students’ varying learning styles.

She earned her B.A. in Political Science from Davidson College (2005), and an M.S.W (2013) and PhD (2021) from UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, Department of Social Welfare with a specialization in Gerontology.

Maximilian Buchholz

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Max Buchholz is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Urban Planning and an affiliate with the California Center for Population Research. His research examines the causes of disparities in economic opportunity across cities. A key theme in his work is understanding how the drivers of economic disparities across city-regions also produce unequal outcomes for different segments of the population (e.g. across race, gender, or educational attainment).

Max’s work at UCLA is funded by a National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. In this research, he is examining whether increasing urbanization within U.S. cities causes racial and gender income inequality to increase.

Max holds a PhD in geography from the University of Toronto, as well as MA and BA degrees in Latin American Studies and history from UCLA and UC Berkeley. Prior to coming to UCLA, Max was the Pollman Postdoctoral Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development at Harvard. He also spent several years working for a community development organization in Los Angeles where he developed afterschool enrichment programming for high school students from low-income communities.

For more details on Max’s work and publications, please visit https://www.maximilianbuchholz.com/.

Brian Garcia

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 Brian Garcia, PhD, AICP, is a Visiting Scholar at the UCLA Department of Urban Planning. Brian’s work focuses on climate adaptation in housing, land use and transport. Dr. Garcia is working on a book on social democratic urbanism in Europe and California. 

Dr. Garcia was previously Assistant Professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in urban and regional planning where he taught housing, urban design, social justice and international planning. Brian has taught urban regeneration, transport planning and been a studio critic in urban design at the Bartlett, University College London (UCL). 

Dr. Garcia has been a visiting researcher at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and the Hong Kong University School of Social Work and Social Administration. He has advised the American Planning Association’s national policy guides on energy and smart growth. Brian has also been a Virtual Fellow for the United States Department of State. 

Brian is an urban designer with experience on large development projects in the United States, China, Hong Kong, India, Kazakhstan and Malaysia. In Los Angeles, Dr. Garcia has worked at the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LAMetro) in Metro Art and Design as well as the Environmental Compliance and Sustainability Program. Prior to that, he worked as an architectural designer on a variety of projects including portions of the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit system and within the Executive Architect team for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s (OMA) Prada expansion. 

Dr. Garcia studied for his PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL) and the Yale University School of Architecture. His field work took place in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and Medellin. Dr. Garcia’s PhD supervisor was Professor Sir Peter Hall. Brian holds degrees in architecture, art and urban planning. 

A native of Central California, Brian grew up aware of the importance of the environment and resource management. However, he was always fascinated with cities and their cultural institutions. These experiences motivated his interest in environmental policy and urban design. 

Recent Publications 

Garcia, B. (2021). Scanning for Cultural Competency in Online Urban Planning Programs. Urban Planning, 6(4), 273–282. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i4.4574 

Garcia, B. (Autumn 2020). Urban Design Review in the Creative Milieu Los Angeles, Urban Design Group Journal, London, UK. https://www.udg.org.uk/sites/default/files/publications/files/UD156_magazine.pdf 

Garcia, B., Density and Demographics in Los Angeles Transit-Oriented Development. Cities in the 21st Century the International Seminar on Urban Form, Held Online, Sep 1-4, 2020. https://doi.org/10.26051/0D-SYDT-ZXP2 

http://www.brianpgarcia.com/ 

LinkedIn 

Google Scholar 

Erin Nakamura

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Education:

M.S.W., University of California, Los Angeles

B.A.. California State University, Long Beach

 

Publications:

Katz, L. S., Cojucar, G., Beheshti, S., Nakamura, E., & Murray, M. (2012). Military sexual trauma during deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan: Prevalence, readjustment, and gender differences. Violence and Victims, 27(4), 487–499. https://doi.org/10.1891/0886-6708.27.4.487