Dr. Manuel Pastor is Professor of Geography and American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California where he also serves as Director of the Program for Environmental and Regional Equity (PERE) at USC’s Center for Sustainable Cities and co-Director of USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII). Pastor holds an economics Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and has received fellowships from the Danforth, Guggenheim, and Kellogg foundations and grants from the Irvine Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the California Environmental Protection Agency, the California Wellness Foundation, and many others. In recent years, his research has focused on the economic, environmental and social conditions facing low-income urban communities in the U.S.

His most recent book, co-authored with Chris Benner and Martha Matsuoka, is This Could Be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Cornell University Press, 2009). Dr. Pastor currently serves on the Regional Targets Advisory Committee, a group advising the California Air Resources Board on methods to set goals for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through better land use planning.

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