CGA Welcomes New Executive Director Dr. Rachel Franklin
Beginning on March 3, 2025, geographer Dr. Rachel Franklin will join the Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA), part of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) at Harvard University, in the role of Executive Director. In her new role, Franklin will succeed Dr. Wendy Guan and will direct all operations of Harvard's largest organization dedicated to geographic research, technology, and teaching, working with Professor S.V. Subramanian, chair of the CGA Faculty Advisory Group. The CGA combines consultation services, technical training, platform development and sponsored research to support and drive forward a diverse range of research projects involving geospatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS) across the University.
Franklin has more than 20 years’ experience as an educator and researcher in GIS, spatial analysis, and quantitative methods. Her research interests are in the sources and impacts of demographic change as it occurs at multiple spatial scales, and in novel forms of data and analysis to identify and address that change. Her most recent research explores how smart city technologies contribute to and reinforce socio-economic and spatial inequalities. Her recent projects have examined regional inequality, population loss, and shrinkage at the local and regional scales, and her project titled “Spatial Inequality and the Smart City” focuses on improving the adoption of “smart city” technologies.
Franklin began her professional career in 2002 as a statistician demographer for the US Census Bureau, and in 2007 became Deputy Director of the American Association of Geographers. During those times, she also served in lecturer positions at the University of Maryland from 2004–2009, before joining Brown University in 2010 as Associate Director of Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) and associated faculty in Population Studies.
Franklin has been a full professor of geographical analysis at Newcastle University’s Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), and the head of Newcastle Data since 2022. She also joined the Alan Turing Institute in 2021, currently serving as Group Leader for Liveability in the Urban Analytics Programme. She is also a visiting professor at Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI), Italy, and a visiting scholar in population studies at Brown University.
Franklin received her bachelor’s degree in French and Political Science in 1994, and her MA in Wed European Studies in 1996, both at Indiana University. She received her PhD in Geography, with a minor in spatial analysis and remote sensing, in 2004 at the University of Arizona.
