Prior to becoming a founding Principal in the non-profit Transportation Choices for Sustainable Communities, Dr. Joseph Kott held senior positions as a transportation planner with the County of San Mateo, Wilbur Smith Associates in San Francisco, Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates in San Francisco, and as Chief Transportation Official for the City of Palo Alto. Dr. Kott holds a doctorate in urban and regional transport planning from the Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute (CUSP) at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, master’s degrees in urban and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and in both transport planning and traffic engineering from the Institute of Transport Studies at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. His doctoral dissertation on the design and assessment of sustainable commercial arterial streets (main streets) was written under the supervision of Professors Jeff Kenworthy and Peter Newman. Dr. Kott has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) since 1982 and in 2007 was awarded Professional Transportation Planner (PTP) certification from the Transportation Professional Certification Board Inc., an affiliate of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, achieving the highest certification test score in the nation.