Jill is an associate principal and planner in Sasaki’s Urban Studio with over a decade of experience collaborating with public sector and non-profit clients. Her expertise in climate adaptation and resilience, public engagement, and park/landscape planning enables municipalities, states, and conservancies to implement strategies that respond to the changing climate, increase equitable access to parks, and grow greener, more resilient cities. Her projects have been recognized with three National Planning Achievement Awards from the American Planning Association for public engagement (2018), resilience (2019), and implementation (2020).

Jill’s approach is centered on listening and collaboration. She believes that combining community input with data-driven findings and insights from multi-disciplinary design teams leads to implementable strategies that advance multiple objectives. Her work is known for revealing insights through data that enable community leaders to advocate for positive change.

She brings a national perspective in helping communities adapt to a changing climate. Jill has worked with communities in Florida, Colorado, Louisiana, Rhode Island, and Alabama to add resilience strategies to their parks and restore local ecosystems. Her work on citywide Climate Ready Boston shed light on the disproportionate impacts of climate hazards on socially vulnerable populations. She collaborated with an interdisciplinary team at Sasaki, The Nature Conservancy, and other partners to develop an interactive online tool—NRCsolutions.org— designed to give community leaders information to make thoughtful choices about flood solutions and identify relevant nature-based solutions for their specific contexts.

Common to her work is a focus on bringing together diverse constituents to identify shared visions for places/open spaces and outlining paths towards achieving these visions. For example, she was project manager and lead planner for the High Line Canal Community Vision Plan, a 71-mile greenway in Denver, which was the Gold Winner of the 2018 APA National Planning Achievement Award for Public Outreach.  The final plan was endorsed by all 11 jurisdictions along the canal—the first time in the canal’s 150-year history that all jurisdictions have come together to support a common vision.

Jill is currently co-leading the Parks + Equity Atlas with Laura Marett. A 2019 Sasaki research grant winner, the research initiative is taking a national look at the equity of access to parks and recreation opportunities.

Jill holds a master in urban planning from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and dual undergraduate degrees in architecture and economics from Clemson University.