Kome Ajise

Kome Ajise is the executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments. He has three decades of experience in regional planning and transportation, most recently as the Director of Planning at SCAG. Prior to working at SCAG, Kome was the Chief Deputy Director at the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), where he was responsible for internal operations, overseeing more than 18,000 employees and a budget in excess of $1.1 billion. Previously, he was Caltrans’ Deputy Director of Planning and Modal Programs and oversaw the Aeronautics, Mass Transportation, Rail, Transportation Planning, Local Assistance, and Research Innovation and System Information Divisions. Kome has a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography and Regional Planning from the University of Benin, Nigeria and a Master of City and Regional Planning degree from California State University, Fresno.

Erin Bromaghim

Erin Bromaghim serves as the Deputy Mayor of International Affairs in the Office of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, focused on bringing global opportunities to Angelenos and connecting Los Angeles to economic and cultural partners around the world. She leads a team with deep expertise on international trade and investment, international relations, educational and cultural exchange, the Sustainable Development Goals and the green economy, city diplomacy, gender equity, and major global events including the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

tamika l. butler

tamika l. butler — an expert on the built environment, equity, and anti-racism — is founder of tamika l. butler consulting. Previously, she was the Director of Planning, California and the Director of DEI at Toole Design. She’s pursuing a PhD in Urban Planning at the UCLA. tamika received her J.D. from Stanford, and received her B.A. and B.S. at Creighton University in her hometown of Omaha. She lives in Los Angeles with her wife and kids.

Steven Cheung

Stephen Cheung is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC) and its subsidiary, the World Trade Center Los Angeles (WTCLA). As CEO of the LAEDC, Mr. Cheung brings together the capabilities of LAEDC’s mission-delivery department areas, including the Institute for Applied Economics (Research), Business Assistance, Industry Cluster Development, Workforce Development, World Trade Center Los Angeles (International), Strategic Relations, Communications & Marketing, and Public Policy, into a single team that delivers the LAEDC’s critically important, public-benefit mission – Reinventing our economy to collaboratively advance growth and prosperity for all.

Genevieve Giuliano

Genevieve Giuliano is the interim dean and Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Ferraro Chair in Effective Local Government at the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. She served as the USC Price School’s first associate dean for research and helped establish crucial infrastructure, including the Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics. For more than 20 years, she directed the METRANS Transportation Consortium and built it into one of the nation’s top transportation research organizations.

Bill Higgins

Bill Higgins is an enthusiastic regionalist and enjoys working on the day to day policy issues that improve the ability of regional governments to serve their member cities and counties. Mr. Higgins joined CALCOG as its executive director in 2011. Previously, he spent 11 years as a senior staff attorney, program manager, and legislative representative for the League of California Cities and its nonprofit affiliate, the Institute of Local Government. There, he focused his efforts on local and regional planning, housing, economic development, and land use policy. He has been an adjunct professor at Sonoma State University and teaches periodic classes through the UC Davis and UCLA Extension Programs. In his college years, Mr Higgins demonstrated an odd preference for bucked-tooth mammals, getting a Bachelor of Science in Agriculture & Resource Economics from Oregon State University (Go Beavers) and a law degree from the University of Minnesota (Go Golden Gophers).

Alicia John-Baptiste

Alicia John-Baptiste is the president and CEO of SPUR. She is responsible for defining the overall vision and strategy for the organization. A seasoned leader and public policy professional, Alicia has over 20 years of experience reimagining systems to create better outcomes for people. Her optimistic vision and practical approach inform SPUR’s efforts to build a Bay Area where all people can thrive.

Prior to her time at SPUR, Alicia developed deep appreciation for local government and its commitment to the collective good while serving in leadership roles for the City and County of San Francisco, most recently as Chief of Staff at the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. Locally and nationally recognized for her public policy expertise, inspirational perspective and creative approach to systems change, Alicia focuses her talents and experience on building shared dreams. Alicia holds a Masters degree in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Duke University. She lives in Oakland with her husband, twin children and puppy, Bowie, and loves nothing more than to travel with three of the four of them.

John Lauermann

John Lauermann is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at Pratt Institute, where he teaches GIS and data visualization. He also directs Pratt’s Spatial Analysis and Visualization Initiative, a research center that supports GIS scholarship across the university. His research analyzes how social inequality impacts the landscape of American cities, on topics including gentrification and mega-events. He has published widely on mega-event planning, and edits the Mega-event Planning book series at Palgrave Macmillan.

Trent Lethco

Trent Lethco is a Principal with Arup’s City Planning and Design team. His focus is on transportation planning projects in the Northeast, major events in the Americas region, and human movement through buildings, places, and spaces. He instructs at Pratt Institute, serves as a board member for the Regional Plan Association, and is a Trustee of the 18+ member organization Arup. He is also an alum of ULCA and serves as an advisor to the Institute of Transportation Studies.

Gustavo Lopes dos Santos

Gustavo Lopes dos Santos is an urban planner and researcher at CiTUA, IST, University of Lisbon. His scientific activities focus on the dynamic relationship between the city and (mega-)events, regarding the planning, delivery, and permanent and temporary effects in territories and communities. In 2022 he was awarded with the Olympic Studies Centre PhD Students and Early Career Academics Research Grant Programme, of the International Olympic Committee.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning and Interim Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. She has authored or edited13 books and over 150 scholarly articles and chapters about public spaces, mobility and safety, women’s travel, transit homelessness, transit security, TODs, high-speed rail development, gentrification and displacement. Her research has been supported by the NSF, HUD, US DOT, NEA, Caltrans, CARB, MTI, AARP, and Haynes, Mellon, Gilbert, and Archstone Foundation, among others.

Juan Matute

Juan Matute is the Deputy Director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and an expert on transportation and land use and how technological innovations like driverless cars, electric vehicles and GPS mobile apps like Waze and Google Maps affect urban mobility and transportation accessibility, especially in Los Angeles. Matute also examines sustainable transportation and land use, transit systems, and local government climate planning, specifically how local governments measure and manage greenhouse gas emissions.

Aaron Paley

Since 1982, Aaron Paley has focused on how Angelenos experience and use public space through temporary and permanent civic interventions at the unique nexus of event production, arts, community, culture, transportation, urban planning, and policy. Paley co-founded Community Arts Resources (CARS) with Katie Bergin in 1989 to “create unique experiences where art, culture, community and civic life collide.” CARS helped incubate and develop CicLAvia where he served as its founding director from 2010 to 2015.

Katharine Perez

Katherine is the Co-Director of Los Angeles Tomorrow, match-maker initiative creating a big-tent coalition that will facilitate community-powered activations or installations across LA County. Los Angeles Tomorrow seeks to leave a legacy of enhanced civic capacity and public realm improvements in response to the series of international events that LA will be hosting over the next several years. Until recently, Katherine was a Principal and Los Angeles Office Leader for Arup, an international engineering, design and consulting firm. With over 300 professionals in the LA Office, she played a critical role in the office management, project pursuits and Arup’s role in external markets.

Seleta Reynolds

Seleta has 25 years of experience in transportation in both the public and private sector. As Chief Innovation Officer of LA Metro, her responsibilities include delivering the mobility program for the 28 Olympic and Paralympic Games, as well as a mobility wallet and a strategy for transitioning the agency to a Zero Emission Bus fleet. Formerly, she was the General Manager for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation where she launched Vision Zero, a goal to get to zero traffic deaths, in Los Angeles after leading a similar effort in San Francisco. She is the founding chair of the Open Mobility Foundation, an open-source project to build digital infrastructure for the public realm and serves on the Executive Committee of the ITS America Board of Directors.

Brian D. Taylor

Brian D. Taylor, PhD, FAICP is a Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy in the Luskin School of Public Affairs and a Research Fellow in the Institute of Transportation Studies at UCLA. He teaches courses on transportation, land use, and urban form; public transit and shared mobility; and transportation economics, finance, and policy. Professor Taylor studies travel behavior and transportation equity, finance, history, and politics. His recent research examines falling public transit ridership, public sector responses to new transportation technologies, the socio-economic dimensions of travel behavior, the equity of increased local option sales taxes for transportation, the economic effects of traffic congestion, and the transportation policy and equity implications of the SARS-Cov-2 global pandemic.

Christopher Torres

Chris is an award-winning landscape architect and urbanist passionate about creating a more equitable, resilient and vibrant Los Angeles. He founded Agency Artifact as a civic design studio, creating ambitious placemaking experiences. He has 15 years of international experience designing urban parks, public art, large-scale housing projects and regenerative infrastructure. He also serves as a Planning Commissioner for the City of Los Angeles and trained in urbanism at LMU, UC Berkeley and Columbia University.

Molly Wagner

Molly Wagner is a Senior Manager on the Transportation team at the Center for Neighborhood Technology. Molly works with nonprofits, academia, and private sectors to center community priorities and lived experience in transportation planning and policies. She is deeply interested in exploring how policies influence the implementation of infrastructure and its impact on residents’ quality of life. Her recent research documents the travel experiences of people with disabilities and examines how transportation practitioners interact with ADA.

Alissa Walker

Alissa Walker is a writer based in Los Angeles where she has covered transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy for two decades. She edits the newsletter Torched, which tracks the legacy improvements that LA is making for the 2028 Summer Olympics. Alissa is the 2021 recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary for her writing on design and urbanism, and played herself on the traffic safety episode of Adam Conover’s show Adam Ruins Everything, “Adam Ruins a Murder.” She lives in L.A.’s Historic Filipinotown neighborhood, where she is the co-host of LA Podcast, an avid ice cream consumer, and a mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.