Two new faculty members, Dan Chatman and Doug Houston, join UCTC this fall. And both have previous ties to the center.
Dan Chatman has left an assistant professorship at Rutgers University to join the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, where he began his academic journey.
After receiving his BA in English at Berkeley, Chatman served in the Peace Corps for three years, then moved to Cambridge, Mass., where he obtained a master's degree in public policy at Harvard. He subsequently worked as a local economic consultant in Oakland before heading to Los Angeles where he graduated with a PhD in urban planning from UCLA in 2005.
He received the UCTC "Student of the Year" award for the 2005-2006 year.
In addition to teaching, Chatman held the positions of director and research director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at Rutgers.
In the fall of 2009, Chatman is teaching two graduate courses: transportation and land use planning, and statistical analysis.
His research interests include travel behavior and the built environment, water governance policy, municipal fiscal decision-making, and local economic development. He is also interested in working on transportation finance and institutional issues relating to the adoption of climate change mitigation goals. "Both are particularly relevant in the California context," he noted.
At Berkeley, Chatman will continue his current research on immigrants and transportation and on the economic impacts of transit investment. In addition, he is writing a book about the "smart growth" movement.
Douglas Houston, the other new UCTC faculty member, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Planning, Policy and Design at the University of California, Irvine and teaches courses in the areas of transportation, air quality, urban inequality, and spatial analytical methods.
His research focuses on the environmental and health implications of urban development and transportation systems. He is interested in how the distribution of economic opportunity and environmental risk is related to urban form and activity patterns, in understanding whether individual location, travel, and activity choices are protective or detrimental to health, and in developing regulatory and institutional strategies to address the harmful impacts of the urban structure.
His research has appeared in the Journal of Urban Affairs, the American Journal of Public Health, and Urban Geography.
His recent work examines the environmental, land use, and public health implications of near-roadway vehicle-related air pollution, with a focus on heavy-duty diesel truck traffic in communities adjacent to the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the UCLA School of Public Health in 2008-2009 (funded by UCTC and the California Air Resource Board) and used innovative activity monitoring to examine how time location and travel patterns of low-income residents in these communities are associated with potential air pollution exposure.
Houston received his BA from the Plan II Honors Program at the University of Texas and his MA in Urban Planning from UCLA in 1999. He received his PhD in Urban Planning there and received the UCTC " Student of the Year" award in 2008.