People - Staff & Advisors

Staff

Sachiko Kuwahara
Sachiko Kuwahara graduated from Gakushuin University in Tokyo with a Bachelor's degree in Political Science in 1998. After having served as an admninistrative attache at the Embassy of Japan in the Czech Republic and a research assistant at the Japan Institute of International Affairs (JIIA), she joined the City and Regional Planning programme at Cornell University and earned her Master's degree in 2007. Her special interests lie in enhancing social sustainability of communities through conservation and utilization of local resources, including cultural and natural heritage. Aside from her Master's thesis that dealt with an alternative preservation planning method for Tokyo, she has written articles on sustainable forest management and agricultural heritage systems during her internship at the United Nations University in Tokyo. She is currently working as a planner at a private planning firm, Regional Planning International Co.,Ltd., in Tokyo, while learning preservation method for Japanese vernacular houses (minka).

David Ralston
David Ralston graduated with a Ph.D. and a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He completed his dissertation on postindustrial/ postmodern Central City Los Angeles and the relation of building practices and public landscapes to place water. David also completed a Masters of City Planning (MCP) at the University of California, Berkeley in community building practices and sustainable planning and civic engagement and education in neighborhood development as well as a Masters of Architecture (MARCH) in cultural worldviews and environmental and site factors in design. David is a city planner with the City of Oakland, California.

Georgia Silvera Seamans
Georgia Seamans is a consulting intern on urban forestry issues in the Oakland Mayor's Office. Georgia has advanced to PhD candidacy in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley. Before her current studies, Georgia worked as a community forester with the New Haven Urban Resources Initiative and as an urban forester/arborist with the Boston Parks Department. Georgia holds a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a BA from Wesleyan University. She is a board member of the Berkeley Partners for Parks and the founder of local ecology.

Dave Snyder

Dave Snyder is a long-time organizer and advocate for socially justices transportation and land-use policies. He rides his bike for most trips, including when he should probably walk and enjoy the sights and sounds of the sidewalk.

Before SPUR, he served as the director of program development for the Thunderhead Alliance. In that position he researched and promoted best practices in bicycle and pedestrian planning and advocacy, leading workshops for organization leaders around the United States. Prior to that, Snyder served as the chief executive of Transportation for a Livable City, an organization he founded as a spin off from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which he served as founding executive director from 1991 to 2002. He received a Bachelor of Arts in politics, magna cum laude, from St. Andrews Presbyterian College.

Catherine Xinyuan Yang (Director and Founder)
Catherine Yang received her MA in City and Regional Planning from Cornell University, and a MA in Social Sciences from the University of Chicago. She also trained in urban design and city planning at the University of California, Berkeley. As a planner, she has been heavily involved in regional planning and community development in the Bay Area and in other parts of the United States.  A project on designing alternative economic strategies for the Finger Lake Region in Upstate New York, on which she collaborated, won the Upstate New York Chapter of the American Planning Association Student Project Award in 2005.  Her transportation-planning proposal for rebuilding the Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Katrina was reported in the Cornell University News, and the larger project of rebuilding New Orleans of which it was part, was cited in The New Yorker in May 2006.  Currently, she serves as a principal of Inclusive Sustainable Development and Planning, a Berkeley-based urban design and planning firm. She is a board member of the Berkeley Partners for Parks.

Advisors

Manish Champsee
Manish Champsee is the president of Walk San Francisco, a pedestrian advocacy group based in San Francisco.  He is a long time advocate for sustainable transportation.  Manish has been a software developer for the past 9 years and currently works as a freelancer.  Manish has a Bachelors of Science from the University of Western Ontario.

Stefan Crawford
As director of the United States Commercial Service in San Francisco, Mr. Crawford manages the U.S. Department of Commerce’s international trade facilitation programs in San Francisco. Prior to this position, Mr. Crawford served on temporary assignment as the economic and political officer at the U.S. Consulate in Duesseldorf, Germany. In addition, he served previously as staff to the Secretary of Commerce’s liaison in California working on economic development issues. Mr. Crawford began his career in Silicon Valley, advising firms on national security- and foreign policy-based export controls. Over his fourteen-year career, he has counseled hundreds of US companies on diverse aspects of doing business abroad.  

Mr. Crawford earned his BA, magna cum laude, from the University of Southern California, and was an Adenauer Scholar at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, where he undertook research on renewable energy technology transfer. He holds a Masters in International Affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Boston, Massachusetts.  While at Fletcher, he devoted a significant portion of his coursework to natural resource policy, and also completed a graduate seminar on environmental policy at MIT. 

A native of San Francisco, Mr. Crawford has traveled extensively internationally.  He speaks German, Spanish, and has a strong working knowledge of French. 

Lanchih Po
Po Lanchih is visiting associate professor at the Institute of International and Area Studies and the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at UC Berkeley. She received her doctorate from the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley in 2001, and then she taught at Peking University in Beijing from 2001 to 2006. Her research interests encompass divergent developmental paths in China's transitional economies, including the influence of Taiwanese direct investment on local institutional change, the globalization of producer services and the formation of China's city-regions, and the socio-economic transformations associated with China's (sub)urbanization process. Representative publications include "Repackaging Globalization: A Case Study of the Advertising Industry in China" in Geoforum, (2006); and "Redefining Rural Collectives in China: Land Conversion and the Emergence of Rural
Shareholding Cooperatives." Urban Studies (2008).

Dr. Po received her Ph.D. degree in Department of City and Regional Planning from the University of California at Berkeley. Her dissertation advisor was Professor Manuel Castells. She also received her M.A. in Urban Planning at the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University.