Elizabeth Delmelle

Background & Research

I am an associate professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and director the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) program. My research studies how neighborhoods change over time - the trajectories they take, the inequalities those trajectories reveal, and the role transportation and other public investments play in shaping change processes. I work across geospatial methods, machine learning, and inferential statistics, and am especially interested in what non-traditional data can reveal about residential sorting: my recent work extracts the amenities and aspirations embedded in real estate advertisement text to understand what neighborhoods are being sold as, and to whom. My current work examines how AI systems represent neighborhoods: what perceptions and biases they encode, where those perceptions depart from measured conditions, and how they may shape residential decisions as people increasingly turn to these systems for advice about where to live.

I came to Penn from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where I was an associate professor and earned my PhD in Geography and Urban Regional Analysis. I also serve as editor-in-chief of Geographical Analysis.

Education

BS Geographic Science, James Madison University
MA Geography, State University of New York at Buffalo
PhD Geography & Urban Regional Analysis, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Talks, Podcasts & Press

Chatbot Realtor — The Pennsylvania Gazette (June 2026) What happens when you ask an AI whether a neighborhood is a good place to raise a family — and then tell it the family is Black. A write-up of a live experiment I ran at Penn's AI Month. Read

My Friend Claude: A One-Year Check-Up — The GLaD Podcast, Ep. 35 (2026) A candid hour on how AI has and hasn't changed academic practice, one year on from the initial hype. Listen

Transit-Induced Displacement — UCLA Housing Voice Podcast, Ep. 12 On evictions, new rail stations, and why a widely held belief about displacement may be wrong. Listen

Publications

A current list of my published work is available on Google Scholar.

Beyond Academia

I love to read, go to CrossFit (but I'm still no good), talk to people about going to CrossFit, drink coffee, and cheer for my beloved NY Mets with whom I have an extremely unhealthy relationship.