Katherine Foo, PhD MLA, is co-director of the Berlin Project Center and an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Integrated and Global Studies at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Her research focuses on urban environmental governance and landscape visualization for social and environmental justice. She is passionate about fostering institutional change to empower community groups by building academic-civic partnerships. Through engaged, inclusive practices like participatory mapping, scenario development, and design-build workshops, she has worked with communities to develop tools to understand their places better, strategize ways to change them, and design and build new places. She has extensive experience teaching and facilitating engaged, experiential learning in order to teach students about complex, wicked problems in innovative ways; to connect them with real world efforts to address these problems; and to give students an opportunity to engage meaningfully with them. Her experience with place-based learning and projects includes both international (Thailand, Cambodia, Bolivia, Guatemala) and domestic (Boston, Worcester, New York City) localities. She was previously a Radcliffe/Rappaport Doctoral Public Policy Fellow and USDA Forest Service Sustainability Science Fellow. She has published in Landscape Ecology, Landscape & Urban Planning, Cities, Geoforum, and other outlets.
