Recruitment Plans for
Fall 2026
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. 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: 1-2 Doctoral Student(s)
Research Interest(s): Water Resources Planning, Human Geography, Flood Risk Mitigation, Infrastructure Resilience
Current Research/Research Projects: I am recruiting PhD students to work on several funded projects focused 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 regional difference in local government shape access to water and wastewater infrastructure.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Ideal candidates will have experience conducting quantitative analysis, with backgrounds in environmental science, urban planning, geography, public policy, economics, or related fields.
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, Affordable Housing, Community Development
Current Research/Research Projects: I am interested in a doctoral student who could focus on one of two research agendas: 1) scalability of shared equity homeownership models, including CLTs, and other affordable housing strategies; 2) examining anchor institution models across the US (and beyond), including a broad survey assessment and detailed analysis of investments, motivations, and outcomes.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: A planning background is preferred with experience in (or ability to develop) mixed methods research skills, including survey design and interviews. Experience with GIS and large datasets would be preferred.
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): Infrastructure, Energy, Climate, Human Geography
Current Research/Research Projects: I am recruiting a PhD student to work on a funded project looking at the governance, politics, and experiences of increasing household level reliance on backup generation, deliverable fuels, and natural gas. More broadly, my research focuses on the local politics of energy transitions and infrastructure development in both urban and rural places, and I'm excited to advise students with an overlapping interest in the place-based politics of infrastructure (energy or otherwise).
Desired Qualifications & Skills: The ideal candidate has experience in, or an ability and willingness to develop, mixed methods research skills, including interviews, document analysis, GIS analysis, and cleaning and preparing datasets for further 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. Aaron Flores
Faculty Name: Dr. Aaron Flores
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography or PhD GIS
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Health Disparities, Community Engagement, GIS
Current Research/Research Projects: Current projects focused on understanding and addressing disparities in healthcare access and outcomes across marginalized communities. Areas of interest might include (but are not limited to) exploring how factors such as transportation access, healthcare infrastructure, and socioeconomic determinants contribute to these disparities.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: GIS and Spatial Statistics.
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, GIScience, big data, large language models, remote sensing, knowledge graph
Current Research/Research Projects: My research focuses on the intersection of cyberinfrastructure, big data, and geospatial artificial intelligence to address data- and computation- intensive environmental problems, like disaster mapping (flood, landslide, wildfire etc.), environmental change and its local and global impacts, and climate science.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Highly motivated candidates who are driven to move research forward. Strong computational and technical skills in AI and deep learning, preferred background in remote sensing, numerical models, and big data analytics.
Dr. Jose-Benito Rosales Chavez
Faculty Name: Dr. Jose-Benito Rosales Chavez
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography, PhD GIS, or PhD Urban Planning
Looking to Recruit: 1 Doctoral Student
Research Interest(s): Health Disparities, Community Engagement, GIS
Current Research/Research Projects: Current projects focused on understanding and addressing disparities in healthcare access and outcomes across marginalized communities. Areas of interest might include (but are not limited to) exploring how factors such as transportation access, healthcare infrastructure, and socioeconomic determinants contribute to these disparities.
Desired Qualifications & Skills: GIS and Spatial Statistics.
Dr. David Sailor
Faculty Name: Dr. David Sailor
Email: [email protected]
Students Applying to: PhD Geography
Looking to Recruit: 1-2 Doctoral Student(s)
Research Interest(s): Urban Climate, Energy Balance Measurements, Urban Building Energy Modeling
Current Research/Research Projects: I have research projects that are looking at building and neighborhood scale impacts of urban heat mitigation technologies and strategies. This requires students who have expertise in either modeling (e.g., building to microscale) or measurements (e.g., experience with radiation, convection, and conduction measurements in urban settings).
Desired Qualifications & Skills: Building energy simulation experience with EnergyPlus. Observations experience with datalogging weather stations, heat flux sensors, net radiometers, etc.