Dr. David Hsu, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will present a lecture Friday at Georgia Tech on Targeting and Scaling Up Environmental Plans within Cities.

Hsu's talk is being sponsored by the Center for Geographic Information System (CGIS) advisory board.

He will talk on how "environmental policies can be spatially insensitive, while urban planning efforts in individual cities often seem to be smaller than our global environmental problems. How do we design and target environmental policies better, and how do we grow our planning efforts to scale?"

He'll demonstrate some challenges and opportunities to answer these questions, using examples from recent work in the United States, and Brazilian and Indian cities, on energy efficiency, data analysis, and the planning of green and smart infrastructure.

Hsu is an assistant professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. His research and teaching areas focus on how to use environmental policy and planning in order to shape cities to become more efficient in their use of resources, more livable, and healthier.

Much of his work seeks to assist local policymakers and environmental advocates directly in the stages of policy design and implementation.

He taught previously at the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, and worked in engineering, finance, and in the city governments of New York and Seattle.

He will speak at the Tech Square Research Building (RSRB).

RSVP to stephanie.merrick@design.gatech.edu