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 received a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Los Angeles; a MA in City Planning (MCP) and Architecture (MARCH)  at the University of California, Berkeley; 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 planner with the City of Oakland, California.

Georgia Silvera Seamans

Georgia Seamans received PhD degree from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley, a Master of Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and a BA from Wesleyan University. 

Georgia  was a consulting intern on urban forestry issues in the Oakland Mayor's Office. Georgia received PhD degree from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at UC Berkeley. Before her 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. 

She was a board member of the Berkeley Partners for Parks and is 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. 

Catherine Yang specializes in international project management services in the fields of urban planning, economic development, capital investment, redevelopment and business attraction between the Bay Area and China. She distinguishes herself by eliminating the miscommunication often inherent in cross-cultural business engagements while maintaining focus on substantive issues. 

Catherine Yang has worked closely with architectural designers, urban planners, project managers, mayors and community development agencies in Alameda County, the City and County of San Francisco, the Ports of San Francisco and Oakland, the City of Oakland, and other Bay Area cities on a variety of economic develop issues facing the bay region. She has also worked closely with both the public and private sectors as well as financial institutions in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Hunan, Hubei, Henan and Shandong in China. 

Currently, she serves as a principal of Inclusive Sustainable Development and Planning, a Berkeley-based urban design and planning firm. 

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.

Stephan P. 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.