A presentation of Susan Saegert and Gary Winkel

Susan Saegert is Director of the Center for Human Environments (CHE) and Professor of Environmental Psychology at the CUNY Graduate Center where she has worked since receiving her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan. She was also the first director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her early research focused on crowding and environmental stressors. She then began to study the relationship between housing and human development and well being, as well as women and environments. These interests involved her with a team of architects, planners and housing finance experts in developing a plan for Downtown Denver that increased residential uses and amenities, which is evidenced in the cityscape of Denver today.
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 and Gary Winkel have worked in partnership with community organizations and coalitions to understand how to successfully improve distressed housing and neighborhoods in New York City. This work has also resulted in a book on social capital co-edited with two political scientists: S. Saegert, J.P. Thompson, & M. R. Warren (Eds) Social capital and poor communities. New York: Russell Sage, 2001.
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. With Gary Winkel, she wrote the Annual Review of Environmental Psychology for 1990.

Gary Winkel is a Professor of Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York He received his Ph.D. in psychology at the University of Washington with a minor in quantitative methods.
After receiving his degree, he served as an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington and was involved in research on museum and exhibit design as well as a project concerned with the redevelopment of downtown Seattle, Washington. During this period, he also worked jointly with Philip Thiel and Francis Ventre on the development of the first interdisciplinary journal focused on person/environment relationships. He served as editor of Environment and Behavior from 1969 until 1980.
In 1968, Professor Winkel joined the Environmental Psychology Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. There, in collaboration with William Ittelson, Harold Proshansky, and Leanne Rivlin, he was the co-author of the first textbook in environmental psychology titled Introduction to Environmental Psychology. His research interests moved in the direction of hospital design and he worked for seven years as a research and design consultant to Bellevue Hospital in New York. Subsequently, he began working with Professor Susan Saegert of the Environmental Psychology Program on housing and community related research which has continued until the present. In addition to his interests in housing research, Professor Winkel has focused on methodological and statistical issues related to field research in environmental psychology.