معرفی
Arlie Adkins serves as Associate Professor with dual appointments in the School of Landscape Architecture and Planning at the University of Arizona's College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA) and the Health Promotion Sciences Department within the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health. He holds the position of Program Chair for the Master of Science in Urban Planning program and teaches transportation planning, planning theory, and capstone studios.
Dr. Adkins earned his PhD in Urban Planning from Portland State University and Master's in City Planning from UC Berkeley. Prior to academia, he worked as a planner at TriMet (Portland's transit agency) and for carsharing pioneer Flexcar.
His research program investigates transportation equity through three interconnected lenses: systemic health and safety disparities in urban transportation, socioeconomic applicability of walkability metrics, and affordable housing's role in enabling access to opportunity-rich neighborhoods. He emphasizes sociocultural contexts in built environment assessments, particularly focusing on Mexican American communities and refugee populations. His work integrates critical race theory to expose racial biases in transportation systems, as demonstrated by his nationally covered research on driver yielding behavior at crosswalks.
Recent publications reveal a methodological shift toward qualitative assessment tools like the Qualitative Pedestrian Environments Data (QPED) Toolkit, addressing limitations of quantitative metrics in capturing social dimensions of walkability. His scholarship increasingly centers refugee mobility and Global South urbanism, reflecting expansion into transnational equity frameworks while maintaining core focus on transportation-housing-health intersections.
Dr. Adkins has secured major funding from the Federal Highway Administration, National Institute for Transportation and Communities, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He co-led the CDC-funded Physical Activity Policy Research Network (PAPRN+) collaborating center and directs the QPED initiative, which has trained practitioners through workshops including the 2019 Transportation and Communities Summit in Portland.
His leadership extends to program development, evidenced by the MS Urban Planning program's #5 national ranking among public programs without PhDs by Planetizen (2023) and the UA Urban Planning Capstone's award for best graduate project from the Arizona APA chapter. He actively mentors students through capstone projects focused on transportation equity and housing justice.
