Katharine Aguilar Perez

Katharine Aguilar Perez is the Los Angeles Cities Leader and Principal with Arup. She is an expert in urban planning, transportation, and stakeholder engagement. In the planning and land use field, she is highly regarded for developing complex public participation strategies that require collaboration among multicultural communities. With her background in community development, private real estate development, transportation policy and urban planning, she is recognized as a leader in community planning.

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.

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 New York-based Integrated Planning. His activities span transport strategies and business case analysis, logistics programs for large-scale development, decarbonization plans, multimodal corridor studies, Bus Rapid Transit studies, downtown and station area plans, and technology and innovation in the transport sector. His strong background in transportation planning, land use policy, and infrastructure funding allows him to effectively link mega event opportunities, such as the 2026 FIFA World Cup, to create sustainable fiscal, social, and environmental outcomes for cities. As a key component of achieving this balance, Trent encourages safe, accessible and inviting streets that place people above vehicles.

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 Interim Dean of the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, a former Associate Dean, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning, and a core faculty member of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative. Her research centers on the public environment of the city, its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on the urban resident. Her work seeks to integrate social and physical societal challenges in urban design, open space development, land use and transportation.

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

Aaron Paley is president and cofounder of Community Arts Resources, which is dedicated to Los Angeles’ cultural scene. He is on the board of directors of CicLAvia. Paley has 30 years’ experience in production, administration, and planning for the arts and has directed seminal Los Angeles festivals, including the 1987 Fringe Festival, the Festival of Masks, the 1990 Open Festival, and the Getty Museum’s ongoing Family Festivals. His company launched the public performance series at California Plaza and wrote the plan for programming and use of the 16-acre Civic Park, part of the Grand Avenue redevelopment. He will speak on the arts & culture legacy of the 1984 Games and opportunity for 2028 and beyond.

Seleta Reynolds

Seleta Reynolds is Chief Innovation Officer at LA Metro.

Alissa Walker

Alissa Walker is the editor of Torched. For over 20 years, she has written about LA transportation, housing, urban design, public space, and environmental policy as a staff writer at Gizmodo, Curbed, and New York Magazine. Torched trains a critical eye on the civic investments and policy decisions that Los Angeles is making in preparation for its megaevent-hosting era, including the 2026 World Cup, the 2027 Super Bowl, and most notably, the 2028 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.