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People / Ellen Brennan-Galvin
 

Ellen Brennan-Galvin

Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar

Research Statement

Dr. Brennan-Galvin is primarily a practitioner, having spent 26 years at the United Nations and working and conducting research in more than 20 cities in the developing world, focused on urban environmental issues. Her current work is mainly focused on alternative transportation systems, primarily bus rapid transit systems (BRTs) in developing country cities. She most recently has been involved with a National Academy of Sciences initiative on sustainability in secondary cities in the developing world, in which she has been traveling to various cities in Latin America to study their bus rapid transit systems. She is also conducting research on how to promote linkages between non-motorized transportation and formal transportation systems in developing countries, and is organizing a meeting in this regard at the Woodrow Wilson Center in spring 2007. Another field of research are the linkages between transportation, air pollution and GHG emissions in developing country cities.

She is currently working on a book on urban sustainability, based on her course on “Cities and Sustainability in the Developing World.”

Prior to coming to Yale, she was Chief of the Population Policy Section of the United Nations Population Division. She has conducted research on urban environmental issues and policies in more than 20 developing country cities in Asia, Africa and Latin America and is the author of numerous case studies on mega-cities published by the United Nations. In recent years, Dr. Brennan-Galvin served on the National Academy of Science’s Committee on Population, as well as on the Committee on the Geographic Foundation for Agenda 21. She also served on the NAS Panel that produced Cities Transformed: Demographic Change and Its Implications in the Developing World (2003). She was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. in 2001-2002 and a Population Council Fellow at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University.