Past Scholars

The Division appointed two scholars in 2023-2024. Jaime Zerillo, a graduate planning student at the University of Florida, was our Division's Historic Preservation Scholar. Andrea Cruz Mejia, a graduate planning student at the University of Texas-Austin, was selected as our D-PRAT Scholar! In this interview, Jamie and Andrea talk about their interests and what they are contributing to our Division's initiatives.

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Katelyn Huang was an undergraduate student at California State Polytechnic University—Pomona, where she studied Urban and Regional Planning with an emphasis on Urban Design. As a Division Scholar, she worked with then-chair-elect Marcel Acosta in making an informational video for students, emerging professionals, and others interested in urban design careers.

Check out Katelyn's What is Urban Design? video here.

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As the Summer 2021 APA-UDP Scholar, Shraddha Nadkarni worked with Lauren Trice, Past Chair of the Urban Design & Preservation Division (UDP) and Director of Development at YEP! Youth Engagement Planning, and Corrin Wendell, Division Chair of APA Women & Planning and Executive Director of YEP! Youth Engagement Planning.

Shraddha developed the graphic design and layout of a nine-week Adventures in Planning Program to be taught by local planners in schools throughout the country. This Program is a guide to help planners teach middle-school students, Grades 5-8, about community planning.

The Adventures in Planning Program encourages students to think analytically and talk constructively and collectively about their “how” and “why” questions that center on Urban Planning. The Adventures in Planning workbook is designed to be used with supplemental materials such as handouts, maps, and slideshow presentations from the YEP! website. Shraddha designed the Adventures in Planning workbook to provide a structured lesson plan consisting of easy-to-understand and student-friendly content, activities, and visual representations.

The final version of the guide will be free to Division members as soon as it is published.

While a Division Scholar, Gretchen Harrison was a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign pursuing a master’s degree in Urban Planning with a concentration in Community Development for Social Justice. As an emerging planner, Gretchen was interested in exploring how community-led preservation interventions could strengthen our collective sense of place and belonging, and expand awareness of our nation’s shared, complex history.

She previously worked as a National Council for Preservation Education (NCPE) intern at the National Park Service’s Midwest Regional Office in Omaha, Nebraska. As an intern, she prepared various planning documents and served as the lead author for two reconnaissance surveys, including one that examined a site in Springfield, Illinois, associated with the 1908 Race Riot.

Gretchen holds a Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies from the University of Arkansas. Her undergraduate studies focused on cultural resource management and the role of design in both combating and perpetuating social inequity. For her undergraduate capstone, she prepared a Historic American Landscapes Survey report for Cane Hill Township in Northwest Arkansas.

See Gretchen's Scholarship Work (Coming Soon)

While a Scholar, Franny McLarty was completing her final year as an Urban Planning and Sustainable Development major with a specialization in food systems at Western Washington University. She is inspired by cities as powerful spaces to embody stories of the past and the future, to make people feel alive, and to sustain collective human energy. She is especially interested in food as a tangible connector of human and ecological systems and as a representation of many life-sustaining and joyous processes from growing seeds, to knowing soil, to cooking. Valuing food as sustenance requires extensive community knowledge and multi-generational planning, both of which are practices that contribute to thriving and resilient communities. Additionally, food offers a valuable lens with which to examine the urban: it includes unwritten familial and communal histories, it reveals worlds of traditional expertise held by women, and food can offer unique explorations of race and class histories.

In her undergraduate education, Franny was concerned with examining conventional planning as an agent of oppression, addressing planning and place-making on Indigenous land, and embracing social-justice planning concepts. While a student and Division Scholar, Franny aimed to begin a career in urban planning with an open mind and an eagerness to be a life-long learner. As a skateboarder, she enjoys exploring urban spaces and asking questions about who has been allowed to use certain spaces and why, and how we can use urban spaces creatively. She hoped to take these questions with her into the future, and to continue to see urban planning everywhere.

See Franny's Scholarship Work

Michelle Castro-Pilar is a recent graduate from the University of California San Diego. In June of 2020, she completed her bachelor's degree in Urban Studies and Planning with a minor in Environmental Systems. As an emerging planner, Michelle wishes to respond to changing urban environments in order to support the vitality of our existing and future communities.

During her undergraduate career, Michelle was awarded first-place distinction for her capstone research poster at UC San Diego's 30th Annual Urban Expo. Interested in social equity and urban-rural linkages, her capstone thesis addressed the viability of the emergent “agrihood” movement as a model for sustainable living. Her research was concerned with how the culture, marketing, and the rural environment of one agrihood in Orange County aimed to reinvent the idea of sustainable living, however, marketed elements of luxury living whose cost became conducive to attracting a wealthy class of individuals. Motivated to expose the unearthed class tensions that rise from these types of development, Michelle engaged with historical, community, and media perspectives that suggested a certain class privilege existed within the community that limited how individuals were allowed to experience this new model of sustainable living.

See Michelle's Scholarship Work

Julia Marchetti was a dual-degree Master’s Candidate at The University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design during her tenure as a Division Scholar. As a historian and budding urban planner, Julia is concerned with the intersection of equity, environmental justice, collective memory, and place. She is particularly interested the idea of healing through community-led design and preservation interventions. Julia is passionate about meaningful and intentional community engagement. Currently, she is researching how heritage sites may be leveraged for a shared identity on the divided island of Cyprus. 

As an undergraduate, Julia studied Art History and Environmental Studies at Colgate University. Interested in class, gender, and movement through space, she wrote her thesis on the rural cemetery movement and produced a Climate Action Plan for her Environmental Studies capstone, addressing the need for retrofitting Philadelphia’s rowhomes to combat Urban Heat Island Effect. Through her past and current work, Julia has gained experience in preservation, sustainability, communications, the arts, and community and economic development. Frequently wearing multiple hats, Julia feels that the tools she has learned from her various work experiences inform and build upon each other, instead of contradicting one another. Preservation, design, and policy are not separate entities, but elements that must work together to shape our built and social environments.

See Julia's Scholarship Work

Niana Moore was a student in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of California, Los Angeles while a Division Scholar. She was dually concentrating in Design & Development and Community Economic Development and Housing with specific interest in studying the nexus between development and displacement. As an intern for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, she worked with the development department on several of their redevelopment and community engagement projects.
 
Moore grew up in the Washington D.C area, and holds a B.A. in Art with a minor in Art History from the University of Maryland, College Park. As an undergraduate she studied abroad in Istanbul, Turkey, where she had the opportunity to study the rich history of Istanbul through its built environment. 
 
She hopes to find and implement innovative ways to promote equitable community development via meaningful community design strategies throughout her career, and contributed to such research as a Division Scholar.

Bryan Botello is a graduate of the Master in Urban and Regional Planning program at Virginia Tech’s National Capital Region campus. At Virginia Tech, he worked alongside Professor Ralph Buehler as a graduate research assistant on projects related to regional transit associations, bikeshare, and connected and automated vehicles’ impact on cyclists and pedestrians.

Bryan holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and International Relations from Austin College. His undergraduate study of history and his experiences living and studying in places like Rabat’s medina in Morocco have shaped his appreciation for architectural and cultural heritage.

Previously, he consulted for the Natural Resources Defense Council and worked as a legislative assistant in the U.S. House of Representatives, covering transportation and foreign policy. He hopes to use his Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning to transition to a career as a planner, where he feels he can have a more concrete impact on making more equitable and sustainable communities.

As a Division Scholar, Bryan worked with the Communications Team to enhance outreach efforts and with VT Professor Elizabeth Morton to strengthen ties between the Division and university planning programs.

Born and raised in San Diego, CA, Carla Salehian received her bachelor's degree from the University of California at San Diego in Urban Studies and Planning. There, she was involved in a series of internships and research project that ranged from "asset mapping" in low-income San Diego neighborhoods with UCSD's Center for Community Well-Being to coordinating a "sustainable solutions bike tour down the Pacific west coast for the Global ARC organization. Carla interned at the County of San Diego Department of Planning and Land Use where she gained experience in project processing and working with applicants at the initial intake counter. In 2014, she was a second-year master's candidate for Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a concentration in Design and Development and was interning with the Westwood Village BID in their efforts to design and coordinate the establishment of a parklet program. Carla's research interests include urban design, public space, universal design/accessibility planning, and sustainability. For the Division Scholarship, Carla helped lay the foundation for the Division's case study library, including developing a set of urban design principles to guide the case study development process.

Lauren Trice is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where she pursued a Master’s degree in City Planning with a concentration in Urban Design. She graduated in 2008 from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Historic Preservation. Before returning to graduate school, Lauren was an architectural historian on the eastern plains of Colorado as well as in the Washington, D.C. region. She also produced a training video series and report to Congress for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Lauren's adventures throughout the United States, Denmark, Jamaica, and Chile, have shaped her interest in community engagement and people-based urbanism.

Yolanda Richards was selected as the 2011 UDP Division Scholar in conjunction with the Planning and Women Division.

Richards's UDP-funded Scholarship was focused on her time spent working with youth in the Urbana-Champaign area, and seeking ways to integrate youth into the planning process.

Richards holds a Bachelor’s degree in Urban Studies and Planning from the University of California, San Diego, and at the time of her Scholarship selection, was in the process of completing the last term of a Master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Prior to serving as the 2011 UDP Division Scholar, Richards worked as an intern for the City of Champaign and as a teaching assistant for the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and served as the Volunteer Civic Engagement Coordinator for the Planners Network.

Sarah Sisser was named the 2010 Division Scholar. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts (Historic Preservation) from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and a Master’s degree in Community Planning from Auburn University.

Sisser worked on a variety of preservation planning projects as an intern for the Hancock Park District in Findlay, Ohio, the Chatham County-Savannah Metropolitan Planning Commission, and the City of Auburn Planning Department. She was the 2010 recipient of the Alabama Chapter of the APA's Distinguished Leadership Award for a Planning Student and was awarded Auburn University’s Arch R. Winter Scholarship for Excellence in Community Planning. As an army spouse, Sisser has an interest in the utilization of urban design and preservation principles in the planning of military installations to the benefit of military families. Sisser currently resides with her husband near Ft. Benning, Georgia.

Scott Curry, recipient of a joint Master's degree in Urban Planning and Urban Design from the University of Michigan, was chosen as the 2009 Scholar of the APA Urban Design and Preservation Division.

In March 2008, Maya Haptas, a second-year Master’s student in the Historic Preservation program at Cornell University, was chosen as the 2008 Scholar of the APA Urban Design and Preservation Division's Scholarship Program.

Margot Walker, a graduate of the Pratt Institute, was chosen as the first Scholar of the Urban Design and Preservation Division's Scholarship Program in October 2007.