SUPA’s Urban Planning program welcomes a fresh face to its faculty with the addition of assistant professor Sumei Zhang. “The program here offers me the ability to teach the classes I like to teach and help my research,” Zhang said.

Coming from the City and Regional Planning department in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University, Zhang will be joining the Urban Planning program. She completed one of her master’s degrees at OSU, and is finishing her doctorate.

“She is articulate and engaging, and students will no doubt find her approachable,” said David Simpson, director of the Masters of Urban Planning (MUP) Program. “[Sumei] comes to us from an excellent PhD planning program at Ohio State, and I look forward to her contributions to the department.”

Zhang’s dissertation explores the connections between the interactions of employment in Traffic-Analysis Zones, or population areas about the same size as census block group boundaries, and whether people follow jobs or if jobs follow people. It involves data from three Ohio communities: Akron, Cincinnati, and Columbus.

She hopes to expand her dissertation, going on to land use monitoring, and land use changes at the county level. Eventually it will be extrapolated to other states. “I was attracted by this program because it is strong in policy analysis,” Zhang said. “There are a lot of research centers here, I just want to help.”

Future research endeavors include a focus on economic databases. She hopes to interact with the research centers to help government policy. In the upcoming semester Zhang will be teaching Land Use Planning. “She will be teaching some of the critically important core MUP courses such as Planning Theory and Land Use Planning,” Simpson said. “And she has outstanding quantitative skills, as well.”

Zhang completed her undergraduate studies and her other masters program at Nanjing University in China, and has been in the states for the last six years. “The environment here is so much better than in China, but the Chinese restaurants are much better there,” she said. Outside of the office, she enjoys racquet sports and the theater. - story by Patrick Lewis