Amy Hillier

Associate Professor, School of Social Policy & Practice; Associate Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning, PennDesign Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania

Amy Hillier (she/her/her) currently teaches introductory research methods and social welfare history courses for SP2 and Penn’s undergraduate Urban Studies program. She is the co-director of The Penn Experience, an online course about racism and other forms of oppression for graduate professional students.

Her doctoral and post-doctoral research focused on historical mortgage redlining. For more than a decade, her research focused on links between the built environment and public health. During that time, her primary faculty position was with the Department of City & Regional Planning in the Weitzman School of Design. She moved to SP2 in 2017 in order to pursue new research interests relating to LGBTQ communities, particularly trans youth. She is the founding director of the LGBTQ Certificate.

Dr. Hillier received a BA in History from Middlebury College and her MSW and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Born and raised in a small town in seacoast New Hampshire, she now loves city living and lives with her family in West Philadelphia. When she is not teaching or doing research, you can find her cooking and playing sports with her children or making buttons and other crafts.