Arthi Rao is a research scientist at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development at Georgia Tech. She has had a consistent focus on Health and Place research throughout her career. She has an interdisciplinary educational and professional background in Urban Planning, Epidemiology and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) from Georgia Tech. Her research interests focus on social determinants of health, healthcare access, healthy communities, and spatial methods. She uses methods including spatial clustering, data mining/classification techniques and hierarchical modeling in her research. She has integrated these methods to create decision-support tools for academic and industrial applications.

She regularly collaborates with researchers at The Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech, and the American Planning Association as a subject matter expert on healthy communities’ research and geospatial methods. She has published in journals on the topics of Health Impact Assessment (HIA), sustainability, walkability analysis, regional planning, and therapeutic landscapes. She also teaches courses titled “Public Health and the Built Environment” and “Public Health Analytics” at Georgia Tech.

Specialization Area: Health and Environment

Nancey Green Leigh is a Professor in the School of City and Regional Planning and adviser for the economic development planning, working with masters and doctoral students. Maintaining an active research program, Leigh is currently leading a project entitled "Workers, Firms and Industries in Robotic Regions," funded by the National Science Foundation's Robotics Initiative. She previously led a large scale research effort by three universities focused on sustainable industrial systems for urban regions. Both of these efforts as well as other funded research (brownfields, urban land and manufacturing, resilient infrastructure) contribute to Leigh's long term focus on advancing sustainable development for local and regional economies. As Associate Dean for Research, Leigh is focused on strengthening the research impact of the College of Design. She develops and administers competitive initiatives to support individual and collaborative research by college faculty and affiliated researchers. She oversees the college's seven major research units. She also is engaged in building research connections within Georgia Tech between the College of Design, other colleges and Interdisciplinary Research Institutes, as well as to external funders and collaborators in the public, private and nonprofit sectors. Leigh has published more than 60 articles and four books, Routledge Handbook of International Planning Education (2019 with S.P. French, S. Guhathakurta, and B. Stiftel), Planning Local Economic Development, 6th edition (2017 with E.J. Blakely) adopted for courses in a wide array of universities; Economic Revitalization: Cases and Strategies for City and Suburb (2002 with J. Fitzgerald); and Stemming Middle Class Decline: The Challenge to Economic Development Planning (1994). She was co-editor of the Journal of Planning Education and Research from 2012 to 2016, and was elected a Fellow of the American Institute of Certified Planners in 2008.