Carole Voulgaris

Associate Professor of Urban Planning
Harvard Graduate School of Design

Carole Turley Voulgaris is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Prior to that, she was an Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering at California Polytechnic State University, where she taught courses on sustainable mobility, public transportation, transportation system planning, and intelligent transportation systems. Carole holds a PhD in Urban Planning from UCLA, a Master of Business Administration from University of Notre Dame, and Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University.

Carole’s research focuses on explaining what influences individuals’ and households’ decisions on how to travel through cities, and how transportation planning institutions use information about those decisions to inform plans, policies, and infrastructure designs. She is particularly interested in the development and use of quantitative metrics to describe complex characteristics of the built environment, particularly those believed to influence travel behavior. She has published her research in several journals, including Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, Public Works Management and Policy, Journal of Transportation and Land Use, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Geography, Journal of Planning Literature, Journal of Transport Geography, Journal of Public Transportation, and Transportation.

Her doctoral dissertation, titled Crystal Balls and Black Boxes: Optimism Bias in Ridership and Cost Forecasts for New Starts Rapid Transit Projects was awarded the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Barclay Gibbs Jones Best Doctoral Dissertation in Planning in 2017, and she was the 2018 Pacific Southwest Region University Transportation Center Outstanding Student of the Year. Together with a student co-author, she was also awarded the 2019 Transportation Research Board’s Fred Burggraf Award for excellence in transportation research by researchers 35 years of age or younger.

Carole’s professional experience includes work for Utah Transit Authority; the Parliamentary Liaison Office of the South African Catholic Bishop’s Conference; and Transpo Group, a transportation planning and engineering firm based in Kirkland, Washington. She is a licensed professional engineer in Washington State.