2021 Conference Speaker Bios

Amanda Howell is a researcher with the Urbanism Next Center at the University of Oregon with expertise in e-commerce, new urban freight, automated delivery, and curb management. She is currently working on federally funded projects examining consumer shopping behavior and increasing rates of e-commerce adoption for household provisioning in response to COVID-19, as well as a guidebook on dynamic curbside management. In addition, she is working with the Knight AV Initiative, which is a three-year collaborative effort between the Urbanism Next Center at UO, Cityfi, Detroit, Pittsburgh, San Jose, and Miami-Dade County to pilot and learn about automated mobility technologies today to shape the future of deployment tomorrow.

Amanda holds a master’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning from Portland State University and was the project manager for an affordable housing transportation study sponsored by the California Department of Transportation during her studies.

Before moving to Portland for graduate school, she provided programmatic support to the Prison University Project, a Bay Area nonprofit that operates an onsite, degree-granting program for people incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.