Susan Saegert

Susan Saegert is Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has worked since receiving her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1974. She served as Director of the Center for Human Environments (CHE) and was the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research in inner city communities led her to focus less on how housing conditions can affect residents and more on how communities can affect housing conditions. With colleagues at CHE in the Housing Environments Research Group (HERG), she has worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to successfully improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City. She is a co-editor of Social capital and Poor Communities (Russell Sage, 2005). Her professional activities have included serving as president of Division 34 on Population and Environment of the American Psychological Association, co-chairing the Environmental Design Research Association, and more recently serving on the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Urban Psychology. She has served on the editorial boards of Environment & Behavior and the Journal of Environmental Psychology for most of the last 20 years.