Biographical Information

Andrew Perlstein joined E-IPER in 2005 and is currently a visiting researcher in a Chinese urban planning institute in Beijing.

He first discovered his interest in the environment in high school in New York when he became absorbed in popular environmental literature in his spare time and wrote an environmental column for his school paper. He earned his BA in Environmental Earth Sciences and Asian Studies at Dartmouth College, and spent a spring quarter interning at the Council on Environmental Quality in the White House. He also began his studies of Mandarin Chinese and spent two summers living in Beijing.

Since college, Andrew has studied, worked, and traveled extensively in mainland China. His work in Yunnan Province with a team of consultants from the World Tourism Organization developing a tourism master plan for the provincial government led him back to the United States for his M.S. in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also received a Foreign Language and Area Studies Fellowship to support his ongoing studies of Mandarin.

At Stanford his current research on urbanization, land-use policy, and urban planning practices in China combines remote sensing and qualitative analysis. He is interested in understanding the scale and pace of urban growth in China, the decision-making processes that have contributed to such rapid change, and the implications of this change for environmental sustainability.

In his spare time, Andrew can be found building guanxi by translating Chinese design guidelines into English, explaining the etiquette of Chinese banqueting to visiting foreign consultants, and playing back-up guitar at official planning institute holiday functions.