Contributors

Isabelle Nilsson

Isabelle Nilsson Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography & Earth Sciences and a core faculty of the Public Policy Ph.D. program at University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Nilsson’s research is focused on transportation, housing, and local economic development. She is particularly interested in the effects of public and private investments on firm and household location behavior and how these micro-level behaviors shape intra-urban sorting patterns. Her research is quantitative with theoretical grounding in economics as well as geography.

Elizabeth Delmelle

Elizabeth Delmelle Ph.D. is an urban and transportation geographer and a Geographic Information Scientist at UNCC. Fascinated by cities and neighborhoods and in understanding their processes of change, she continually searches for new and creative ways of visualizing and analyzing dynamic processes from the more complex geocomputational approaches to simple word clouds. She enjoys exploring new data sources or methods, investigating their potentials and limitations in illuminating processes of change. Geographic Information tools and spatial analytical/statistical methods form the core of her research methodological approach.

Claire Schuch

Claire Schuch Ph.D. was the qualitative research lead for this light rail study. In this role, she led the conceptualization, data collection, analysis and dissemination of the surveys, interviews, and focus groups. She also trained and supervised research assistants. She has a BA in Geography and International Studies, with a concentration in Community and Global Health from Macalester College, and a Ph.D. in Geography and Urban Regional Analysis from UNC Charlotte. Over the past nine years, she has been involved in a range of interdisciplinary, mixed-methods, community-based studies covering topics such as Latinx civic engagement, minority and female entrepreneurship, immigrant inclusion, postpartum depression among low-income women, unintended pregnancy, affordable housing, school-to-work transitions for Latinx youth, and domestic violence among immigrants.

Tonderai Mushipe

Tonderai Mushipe is a PhD student in the Geography and Earth Sciences Program at UNC Charlotte. His area of study is urban geography with a focus on transportation and economic mobility. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Master’s degree in Public Administration. For this NSF project his work has focused mostly on community-based research, building relationships with community partners through which we identified and recruited interviewees and focus group participants. He also worked extensively with Dr. Schuch on conducting the interviews and focus groups and the analysis of the transcripts. He has lived in Charlotte for over 13 years and has immigrant roots from the country of Zimbabwe.

Kristine Laura Canales

Kristine Canales joined Charlotte Center City Partners in June 2020. As the Director of Research, Kristine leads the in-house research effort to provide the most up-to-date information about Charlotte Center City through a variety of statistical methods.  

She holds a PhD in Public Policy, with specialization in economics and geography, from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Kristine also holds master’s degrees in statistics and economics from Texas A&M University. Her peer-reviewed publications tackle social and urban issues using methods ranging from econometrics, spatial analytics, and big data analytics. One of the research projects she worked on is a National Science Foundation project that investigates the link between rail transit investments and rising levels of urban economic segregation. 

Prior to joining Charlotte Center City Partners, she taught at the university level at UNC Charlotte and worked with research institutions including the Asian Development Bank and the Asian Institute of Management.  

Alexander Bryant

Alexander Bryant is a recent graduate of the undergraduate program in geography at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is currently employed as a GIS technician for the city of Charlotte.

Michael-Paul “Jack” James

Michael-Paul James is a Ph.D. Candidate in Finance at the Belk College of Business at UNCC. With advanced degrees in Architecture, Urban Design, Real Estate, Public Policy, and Business, his research has explored asset pricing and the impacts of the built environment. His shameless pursuit of knowledge and brazen personality has made him adept at data aggregation and collaborative research projects. He brings a broad understanding of the many facets of real estate and leverages that knowledge to explore new relationships between finance, architecture, policy, and social systems through geospatial modeling.

He is responsible for the design and development of this website, all lightrail and architectural photographs, and the redesign of the diagrams for this website.