Laura Frances

I’m Laura Frances, a city planner interested leveraging data and technology to make cities more resilient and equitable. At Penn, I pursued projects that applied technical and design skills to ‘real-world’ situations including strategic roadmap to deepen Penn’s decarbonization, analyzing Philadelphia’s smart loading zone pilot, or designing an operable solar-responsive bus shelter. I also worked with researchers in Daejeon, South Korea to gain first-hand understanding how ‘smart cities’ operate and affect people’s daily lives.

Prior to pursuing my masters, I led strategic initiatives for digital equity non-profit and ran a real estate innovation consultancy that designed and project managed alternative concepts from a hyper-local food hall in Toronto to a zero-carbon coworking space in Berlin.

I look forward to working at scale across the public and private sectors to build innovative, responsible, and inclusive cities.