Manuel Santana Palacios

Job title: 
Assistant Professor
Department: 
City and Regional Planning
Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering
Bio/CV: 

Dr. Manuel Santana Palacios is an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University with a join appointment in the Knowlton School’s City and Regional Planning Section and the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Geodetic Engineering. He also holds a Provost Scholar Assistant Professorship.

Dr. Santana Palacios specializes in transportation policy and planning and just urban transitions. His research takes an interdisciplinary perspective to study how investments in transportation infrastructures and policy innovations impact population groups differently by race, ethnicity, and other forms of stratification that divide society. His work on transportation and distributive justice also intersects with questions about land uses and urban development, urban technology, and climate change adaptation.

Prior to joining Knowlton, Dr. Santana Palacios was a postdoctoral research associate at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he collaborated with other scholars on a project at the intersection of public transportation planning, health policy innovation, and resiliency. He has worked as a transportation consultant for the World Resource Institute, Steer Davies & Gleave, and the World Bank.

Dr. Santana Palacios has a PhD in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley. He also holds a bachelor’s in civil engineering and a master’s in transportation engineering from Universidad de Los Andes, and a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from UCLA.

Research interests: 
  • Transportation policy and planning
  • Just urban transitions
  • Investment in transportation infrastructure
  • Policy innovation and social stratification
  • Land use and urban development
  • Urban technology
  • Climate change adaptation