Ralph Buehler (Professor, UAP) published a book review of “Better buses—Better cities: How to plan, run, and win the fight for effective transit” in the Journal of Urban Affairs. Ralph also presented (along with Professor Wenwen Zhang) results of the spring MURP studio class, analyzing e-scooters on Virginia Tech’s campus, to Ford Motor Company.
 
Stephanie Davis (Collegiate Assistant Professor, CPAP) has been appointed to serve as a team member on the Government Finance Officers Association's “Rethinking Budgeting for 2020” project. The overarching goal of this project is to develop guidance on how to allocate resources in an environment where the participants all share a common resource base (i.e., the tax base), while maintaining and enhancing trust between participants and a belief that the process was fair. The guidance developed by the project team will be used to inform a comprehensive educational and outreach campaign to local governments.

Theo Lim (Assistant Professor, UAP) and colleagues published an article in Urban Forestry and Urban Greening examining the adaptive management and governance process in the first few years of Philadelphia’s Green City, Clean Waters program. Philadelphia is recognized as having one of the most ambitious goals for incorporating nature-based stormwater management infrastructure (such as rain gardens and bioswales) in the United States and worldwide. The analysis shows how the political processes surrounding the rollout of a new stormwater fee and credit program complicate typical engineering and economics-based estimates of how widespread voluntary adoption of green infrastructure will be.

Shalini Misra (Associate Professor, UAP), Patrick Roberts (Associate Professor, CPAP) and co-author Matthew Rhodes published “Information overload, stress, and emergency managerial thinking” in International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction as well as a second article entitled “The Ecology of Emergency Management Work in the Digital Age” in Perspectives of Public Management and Governance. Finally, as co-leads, Patrick and Shalini are leading a working group on Technology, Policy, and the Public Sector in the COVID-19 environment. This effort was supported by the National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network and the CONVERGE facility at the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado Boulder. The agenda setting paper they drafted this summer with their group can be accessed here.

Dustin Read, an affiliated faculty at SPIA, was appointed head of the Department of Apparel Housing and Resource Management.

SPIA undergraduate Caroline Smith and Courtney Swanson, PhD student in Psychology, are student leaders of a proposal that has been selected for funding through the Virginia Tech Together Campaign competition. The competition selected a total of 5 student-led projects that provided outside-the-box solutions to navigating the COVID-19 pandemic on campus this fall. Caroline and Courtney’s project proposes training facilitators and designing “"virtual communities” for students this semester. Congratulations to Caroline and Courtney! Theo Lim (Assistant Professor, UAP) is the faculty advisor of the proposal.