Linda C. Samuels is Professor and Chair of urban design at the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis and the inaugural Director of Sustainable Design and Environmental Justice. Samuels’s research focuses on infrastructural opportunism – leveraging investment in large-scale systems to create more socially and environmentally productive public works. She teaches inter-disciplinary urban design studios and seminars on Infrastructural Urbanism, urban history and theory, and alternative sustainability metrics. In 2023, she completed an Infrastructure Equity Scorecard Pilot Project for the City of Los Angeles and a produce recovery and distribution mapping project for non-profit Food Forward. Samuels was co-PI on Mobility For All By All, an interdisciplinary project aiming to increase the benefits of St. Louis’s MetroLink expansion for local residents living along the alignment. Previously, Samuels was the director of the Sustainable City Project at the University of Arizona and a Senior Research Associate at UCLA’s cityLAB where she co-developed and co-ran the WPA 2.0 design competition. Her publications include, among others, “A Case for Infrastructural Opportunism” (TAD: Technology I Architecture + Design), and “Measuring What Matters: The True Cost of St. Louis’s New National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency” (2023) with Bomin Kim in a special issue on reparations for the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). Her book, Infrastructural Optimism, is available now from Routledge.