Georgetown University: Urban & Regional Planning Master's Program

Congratulations to Lidya for being one of the recipients for this year's Spirit of Georgetown Award! This honor is well deserved!

Congratulations to Shane & Lorena for receiving this year's URP Tropaia Awards! This honor is well deserved!

Join us on Tuesday, March 31 from 11:30 am - 1 pm for our program open house! During this event, you will have a chance to ask questions and chat with the faculty director and program manager. The open house will be held in our new beautiful building at 111 Massachusetts Ave, NW and lunch will be provided. Register here: https://scs.georgetown.edu/news-and-events/event/10178/scs-open-house-lunch-2026-03-31!

For this week's Alumni Spotlight, we would love to highlight Sarah Umandap! Sarah is being recognized for her work in government/public affairs while also maintaining a professional modeling career. Through her work, she has been able to travel to Norway, France, Greece, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, London, Singapore, and many U.S. states 👏🏼✨

For this week's Faculty Spotlight, we would love to highlight Professor Ken Joh! Professor Joh attended the Transportation Research Board (TRB) Annual Meeting earlier this week titled "Do traditional travel surveys still matter in a world dominated by passive data?" 👏🏼✨

"The session explored the strengths and limitations of household travel surveys versus emerging passive data sources, with a focus on data quality, representativeness, and privacy. The motion for the debate was: Be it resolved: within ten years, household travel surveys will be obsolete. I argued that household travel surveys remain essential because they help explain why people travel, who is traveling, and provide critical ground-truth data for calibrating and validating travel demand models and forecasts."

Yesterday, students had an amazing opportunity to explore public leadership with Paul Wiedefeld, former Maryland Secretary of Transportation and former General Manager of WMATA. The dialogue ranged from disaster management (Key Bridge), public safety (WMATA Shut Down) to many insights related to multimodal transportation planning and management.

And finally…the ribbon cutting!

Acting president Robert Groves: “Our ambition is to help drive the revitalization of this part of the city. We will be here 100 years from now.”

Councilmember Charles Allen helping to cut the ribbon this morning and celebrating the new Cobb Park across the street

So exciting to have Mayor Bowser help cut the ribbon of our new building this morning!

This past weekend, GPS hosted a happy hour mixer during Georgetown's Homecoming Weekend. Current students and alumni had a chance to catch up and create new connections at the iconic Metrobar 🚇

For this week's Capstone Spotlight, we would love to highlight Derrick Behm! Derrick's capstone project focused on urban planning within the deaf and signing community. He explored the issue of continued limited resources and agency needed to achieve equity in throughout all aspects of life. Derrick is continuing to delve into this research with his PhD studies at UCLA👏🏼✨

"This project brought to light how changing attitudes and social justice movements are reflected in plans. Using cultural amenities as a revitalization tool is not sustainable, but as an equity-based community development tool, it has the potential to be sustainable. However, doing this kind of approach is harder!"