Recruitment Plans for
Fall 2027
Thank you for considering the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University for your doctoral studies. We invite you to learn more about the faculty in our school currently looking to recruit doctoral students for the upcoming academic year. Please contact the faculty members for more information by referring to the contact information indicated.
Please note, this list is not exhaustive. Opportunities to work with other faculty may still be possible depending upon the circumstances. Additionally, there are special opportunities for funding such as our prestigious Presidential Graduate Assistantship in Health Disparities.
If you apply to work with someone who is not actively recruiting students, your application may still be considered. However, if you apply and do not identify anyone to work with, your application may not be considered.
Dr. Maura Allaire
Faculty Name: Dr. Maura Allaire
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography or PhD Urban Planning
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Water Resources Planning, Human Geography, Infrastructure Resilience
Current Research/Research Projects: Current projects focus on drinking water governance and resilience of wastewater systems. One project addresses the policy drivers and community impacts of wastewater failure under current and future climate conditions. A second examines how an absence of local government for one-third of the U.S. population living in unincorporated areas shapes access to water infrastructure and approaches for addressing coverage gaps.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Strong quantitative skills, including causal inference methods and experience with spatial datasets.
Dr. Heather Baier
Faculty Name: Dr. Heather Baier
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD GIS
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): GeoAI, GIScience, big data, remote sensing, socioeconomics
Current Research/Research Projects: My research develops spatial deep learning methods that integrate satellite imagery with geospatial data to better understand and predict social and environmental conditions, with a focus on how place, scale, and spatial uncertainty shape model performance and interpretation.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Strong skills in Python and remote sensing and experience with deep learning models preferable.
Dr. Meagan Ehlenz
Faculty Name: Dr. Meagan Ehlenz
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Urban Planning
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Anchor Institutions, Housing Strategies, Community Development, Urban Policy
Current Research/Research Projects: My current research includes a project on anchor institutions and housing strategies, exploring how universities engage in housing-related investments, partnerships, and policy interventions. This work examines universities as institutional actors in local housing systems, including the motivations, strategies, governance arrangements, and neighborhood implications of their efforts. I am seeking to advise a PhD student who will support this ongoing research, helping to build a broad understanding of this emerging policy landscape and contributing to comparative case study analysis.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: The ideal student will have strong writing and communication skills and an interest in housing, community development, anchor institutions, and urban policy. The project emphasizes qualitative and mixed-methods research, including interviews, qualitative coding and analysis, comparative case study development, and content analysis of policy documents, institutional materials, plans, reports, and other sources. There may also be opportunities to contribute to quantitative components of the research. Prior research experience is welcome, but curiosity, careful thinking, and a willingness to develop methodological expertise in housing and urban policy research are especially important.
Dr. Salma Elmallah
Faculty Name: Dr. Salma Elmallah
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography or PhD Urban Planning
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Energy, Infrastructure, Planning, Human Geography, Politics
Current Research/Research Projects: I am looking to advise students interested broadly in the planning and politics of energy, infrastructure, and climate change mitigation. My current projects focus on understanding the expansion of gas infrastructure across the US and the politics of household utility debt and affordability.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: The ideal candidate has experience in, or an ability and willingness to develop, mixed methods research skills, including interviews, document analysis, and GIS analysis. The ideal candidate would also have a demonstrated interest - whether through prior research or work experience, coursework, or extracurriculars - in the social and political aspects of climate, environmental, and infrastructural issues.
Dr. David King
Faculty Name: Dr. David King
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Urban Planning
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Transport, Governance, Zoning, New Technologies, Parking
Current Research/Research Projects: My current research examines transportation implications of gentle density increases, as well as studying the zoning process associated with these increases. I am examining home-based businesses, neighborhood retail, and accessory dwelling units, all of which are often inhibited through zoning and permitting, but offer economic opportunities and neighborhood services. The transport issues associated with these developments, from parking to travel mode to trip generation are poorly understood, yet are at the heart of neighborhood opposition to zoning changes to promote such uses. The zoning issues with these types of developments are also poorly understood, and the process of reform is part of the study.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Any doctoral student I work with should be interested in mixed-methods research. The work will include creating surveys, conducting interviews, mapping, and doing statistical analysis with multiple data sets and sizes. It is not necessary to have these all of these skills prior to the PhD program, as taking methods courses is part of the degree.
Dr. WenWen Li
Faculty Name: Dr. WenWen Li
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD GIS
Looking to Recruit: 1-2 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): GeoAI, Cyberinfrastructure, Big Data, Remote Sensing, Disaster, Climate
Current Research/Research Projects: I expect one student to work on the Presidential PhD Scholarship on GeoAI for Disaster Resilience that I helped develop, and the other from some other fund.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: GIScience, computational skills, AI, deep learning, remote sensing time-series analysis, and/or large language models.
Dr. David Sailor
Faculty Name: Dr. David Sailor
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography (also students with Engineering backgrounds)
Looking to Recruit: One postdoc or grad student, possibly to start in Aug 2027 or Jan 2028
Research Interest(s): Urban Climate research with an emphasis on meteorological and energy balance measurements and modeling.
Current Research/Research Projects: I have research projects looking at building and neighborhood scale impacts of urban heat mitigation technologies and strategies as well as impacts of buildings and energy use on urban thermal environments. Our group commonly brings in students who have expertise in designing, conducting, and analyzing measurement campaigns (e.g., experience with radiation, convection, and conduction measurements in urban settings). We are also increasingly pursuing modeling at scales from buildings (EnergyPlus) to neighborhoods (CityDigitalTwin and EnviMet) to regions (WRF). At the moment I do not have any openings, but I have multiple proposals pending. So, if you are interested in pursuing a PhD, please apply and list me as a potential advisor. I will reach out to top candidates to discuss any positions that become available.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Observations experience with datalogging weather stations, heat flux sensors, net radiometers, etc. Computational fluid dynamics applied at micro- to meso-scales.
Dr. Mark Schmeeckle
Faculty Name: Dr. Mark Schmeeckle
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): geomorphology, rivers, sediment transport, physical geography
Current Research/Research Projects: The main focus of my research is sediment transport and the morphodynamics of rivers. PhD projects could include laboratory experiments of turbulence and sediment motion in a flume, laboratory measurements of river channel morphodynamics in a stream table, field measurements of river channel morphodynamics and sediment transport.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: An ideal student would have some training and a desire to learn about physical processes in landscape dynamics.