Dr. Manuel Santana Palacios will join the Knowlton School as assistant professor in the City and Regional Planning Section beginning autumn 2023. He will also hold an appointment with the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering. Dr. Santana Palacios was awarded a Provost Scholar Assistant Professorship.

Dr. Santana Palacios specializes in transportation policy and planning and just urban transitions. His research takes an interdisciplinary perspective to study how investments in transportation infrastructures and policy innovations impact population groups differently by race, ethnicity, and other forms of stratification that divide society. His work on transportation and distributive justice also intersects with questions about land uses and urban development, urban technology, and climate change adaptation.

Prior to joining Knowlton, Dr. Santana Palacios was a postdoctoral research associate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he collaborated with other scholars on a project at the intersection of public transportation planning, health policy innovation, and resiliency. He has worked as a transportation consultant for the World Resource Institute, Steer Davies & Gleave, and the World Bank.

Dr. Santana Palacios has a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a bachelor’s in civil engineering and a master’s in transportation engineering from Universidad de Los Andes, and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA.