Doctoral Student Profiles

DOCTORAL STUDENT PROFILES

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ERIK LUIS ARROYO

Erik’s research focuses on the intersections of housing and environmental planning and policy, with a primary focus on housing accessibility, climate change adaptation, and natural hazard mitigation. Before beginning his doctoral studies, Erik obtained a B.A. in journalism from Pennsylvania State University- University Park (Penn State), an M.A. in sociology from California State University, Fullerton (CSUF), and was a pre-doctoral scholar in urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Erik’s master’s thesis focused on how housing policy during COVID-19 impacted the unhoused community of Skid Row in Downtown Los Angeles, while Erik’s pre-doctoral research analyzed how renewable energy policy affects low-income Latino/x residents in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. Erik’s current doctoral research explores how colonia housing settlements in South Texas’s Lower Rio Grande Valley are being impacted by climate change-driven natural hazards.

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Samira Bashar

Samira’s research interests lie at the intersection of equitable waterscape planning and informal urbanism in the context of South Asia. She is committed to shaping her academic and professional work around the knowledge and lived experiences of marginalized communities, and, in doing so, seeks to explore the tensions between local knowledge production and traditional development approaches and how that shapes discourse. Samira received her MSCRP degree from UT and her Bachelor of Architecture degree from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). She has more than two years of teaching experience in the field of architecture and planning in Bangladesh, leading studios focused on activity-space relationships, urban design, and housing.

Taylor Cook

Taylor’s research focuses on housing, specifically how local politics, urban regime theory, and decision-making processes affect local homeless service systems. Before joining the CRP program, Taylor was a Program Manager for the City of Austin’s Innovation Office and where she led a team responsible for designing projects and services for people experiencing homelessness in Austin. Previously, Taylor was an IT system design consultant for the Texas Health and Human Services Commission and the founding Director of Farmshare Austin. Currently, she serves on the board of the Texas Homeless Network and is an active volunteer with local mutual aid organizations.

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Shayna Goldsmith

Shayna researches the production of socio-technical systems through the prisms of planning history, transportation, infrastructure, and municipal finance. By particularizing the contingencies involved in producing urban space—speculative investments, implementation failures, ideologies, technologies, and real or perceived threats to order—she examines the circumstances, institutional arrangements, and subjectivities that frame the 'public interest' and dictate the terms of collective action. She looks for new ways to imagine the future through this historiographic approach. Shayna is a native of the Washington, DC area, where she earned her Master's in Urban and Regional Planning at Georgetown University.

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Jiaxuan Huang

Before coming to UT Austin, Jiaxuan worked as a strategic consultant in Shanghai and as an urban designer in Atlanta. She obtained her bachelor’s degree in architecture, a master’s degree in architecture, and a master’s degree in urban design. She is also currently graduating from a master’s in computer science program at Georgia Tech (Summer 2023). Besides her hobby of collecting degrees, she is interested in studying shared micro-mobility in a spatial context and understanding the built environment from machine eyes. Growing up in the compact urban environment of Shanghai, Jiaxuan is enthusiastic about creating an amicable commuting environment for walking, biking, and skateboarding.

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Yueying Ma

Yueying’s research interests focus on the environmental planning field, especially topics about climate change, ecosystem services, and urban resilience. Before entering the Ph.D. program at UT, she had experience using quantitative data to analyze the relationship between water quality and related factors at the Healthy Urban Stream Interdisciplinary Research Lab at the University of Michigan. She received her Master’s degree at Tongji University.

RAMI MANNAN

Rami's research primarily focuses on the methods by which decision-makers can develop empathy and understanding of how East African immigrant populations settle in their newly adopted countries and the ways that local knowledge, mitigation strategies, and unique needs of immigrant communities can relieve and shed light on the strains caused by decision-making processes that affect the services received by immigrant communities. Before joining the CRP PhD program at UT Austin, Rami was previously an assistant teaching professor in the architecture department at Iowa State University. Rami received both his BArch and MSc in architecture from Iowa State University.

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Connor Phillips

With an educational background in public health and urban planning, Connor has studied tobacco cessation programs, micro-mobility and health, and most recently, artificial intelligence in urban infrastructure. As an NSF NRT fellow, Connor’s work will integrate ethics into AI research for smart cities. More specifically, Connor hopes to lead conversations around fairness, justice, and safety in terms of the technological future of our urban environments.

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Md Hamidur Rahman

Hamidur’s research interest lies in the interactions between the built environment and travel behavior, and the mobility justice implications of emerging transportation technologies. He specifically explores how the built environment affects travel behavior, urban facility accessibility, and vehicular carbon emissions in the context of developing countries. Before enrolling in the Ph.D. program, Hamidur worked as a Planner for the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization. He holds a M.S. degree in Earth Sciences (Geography concentration) from the University of Memphis, Tennessee and a B.S. degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Bangladesh.

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Minyu Situ

Minyu’s research interests focus on incorporating critical identity elements (such as gender and race) and individual experiences into the existing travel behavior modeling framework. Before UT, Minyu worked as a project manager/research associate at Tufts University and had experience using qualitative data to analyze technical interventions for walking behavior and statistical and geospatial data to analyze public transport-related policies. Previously, Minyu received an M.S. in Environmental Policy and Planning from Tufts University and a B.S. in Public Affairs/Environmental Management from the Indiana University of Bloomington.

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Huihai Wang

Huihai’s research interests include robotics, computer vision, and deep learning in transportation and the evaluation of the built environment. His research involves the integration of computer vision algorithms and autonomous robotics in evaluating and mapping the urban built environment and recognizing traffic flows and behaviors via 2D traffic videos and 3D Lidar sensors. Learn more >

Farzana Ahmed

Farzana Ahmed is a PhD student in Community and Regional Planning at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on participatory planning, hazard mitigation, and environmental justice, with a particular interest in Gulf Coast communities in Southeast Texas that experience recurring flooding and climate-related risks. She is interested in how participatory approaches and community-generated knowledge can inform more inclusive and equitable planning processes. Farzana previously worked on the Southeast Texas Urban Integrated Field Lab (SETx-UIFL) project, where she contributed to research related to disaster vulnerability and planning practices. Her research explores how local knowledge and lived experiences of risk can inform hazard mitigation planning and policy decisions using participatory methods. She holds a master's degree in urban planning, specializing in Environmental Hazard Management from Texas A&M University, and a bachelor's degree in architecture from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET).