Dr. Jean-Claude Thill

Jean-Claude Thill is a Knight Foundation Distinguished Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is an Affiliate Faculty of the School of Data Science and holds graduate degrees from the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium. Dr. Thill is an urban economic geographer whose research focuses on urban and regional transportation and mobility issues, processes of urbanization, regional science, and geospatial data science. His recent research focuses on modeling past urbanization trajectories of the Charlotte metropolitan area (land use transformation, local and regional drifts in neighborhood quality of life), livability, innovation, and mobility in Charlotte, other US cities, and Chinese cities, and accessibility to public services. He has more than 30 years of teaching and research experience in transportation planning and spatial modeling. His current and recent grants have been awarded from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, Department of Energy, North Carolina Department of Transportation, World Bank, and more. He is the 2012 recipient of the Edward L. Ullman Award for Significant Contributions to Transportation Geography, awarded by the American Association of Geographers. He has also received the Hirotada Kohno Award for Outstanding Service of the Regional Science Association International in 2012.