45 minutes Date: Feb 17, 2021
Stefanie Brodie is a senior researcher at Toole Design Group who specializes in transportation planning and policy. She believes that research should help public agencies make informed decisions and focused her doctoral and postdoctoral research on performance-based decision making in transportation, especially how to incorporate equity and other social sustainability considerations into decision making. Stefanie completed her BS in Civil Engineering at the University of Maryland and obtained a Master’s of City and Regional Planning and a MS and PhD in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to her role at Toole Design, she worked as a Marie Curie postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Nottingham and the Research Program Specialist at the District Department of Transportation.
Ashwini Chhabra, co-founder of Electric Avenue and Chief Policy Officer for Tier Mobility, brings over 20 years experience in public policy, business development and law. He established and led the Global Policy Development team at Uber, where he was an early employee, with a special focus on self-driving cars. He was also an early employee at Bird, an electric scooter sharing company, where he established and led the Global Public Affairs team. He previously held several positions in the Bloomberg administration, including in the NYC Mayor’s Office overseeing the Department of Transportation. Ashwini began his career as a corporate lawyer. He holds a BA from Williams College and a JD from Yale Law School.
Adonia E. Lugo, a cultural anthropologist, currently serves as the Interim Chair for the Master of Arts in Urban Sustainability (USMA) degree program at Antioch University Los Angeles. Dr. Lugo began investigating sustainable infrastructure during her graduate studies at UC Irvine, when she co-created the bicycle event CicLAvia in Los Angeles. After receiving her doctorate in 2013, she worked at the League of American Bicyclists in Washington, D.C. as a national leader in building better “human infrastructure” (diverse social networks and cultural norms) to promote bicycling. Today, Dr. Lugo looks for ways to bring her racial justice expertise from the field of bicycle advocacy into equitable and sustainable mobility at large. She is currently collaborating with partners around the country to define “mobility justice,” a concept that highlights the complex difficulties that people of color and other marginalized groups face both when traveling through public spaces and in urban planning and development processes. In addition to her role as an educator at AULA, Dr. Lugo is involved in a number of projects designed to expand support for mobility justice. She is an advisory board co-chair with People for Mobility Justice, a core organizer of The Untokening, and the manager of the Bike Equity Network email list. Her book, Bicycle/Race: Transportation, Culture, & Resistance, was published in 2018.
Alissa Walker is the urbanism editor at Curbed, where she authors the column Word on the Street, highlighting the pioneering transit, clever civic design, and game-changing policy affecting our cities. For her writing on design and urbanism, Alissa has been named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and Journalist of the Year by Streetsblog Los Angeles. In 2012 her project Good Ideas for Cities was selected for inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2015 she received the Design Advocate award from the LA chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She is also the co-founder of design east of La Brea, a nonprofit that has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants supporting its LA design events. Alissa lives in Los Angeles, where she is a co-host of LA Podcast, a contributor to the KCRW show Greater LA, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.
Last updated February 15, 2022