Staff and Center Associates

Dr. Lauren C. Heberle
Associate Director CEPM
Director EFC Region 4
Phone: (502) 852-4749
Email: L0hebe01@louisville.edu

Lauren Heberle is the Associate Director of the Center for Environmental Policy and Management and Director of the EFC Region 4. Her current work focuses on brownfields, smart growth, sustainable development, and environmental justice. Understanding community participation in each of these areas is a primary concern.

While at the CEPM, Lauren has collaborated on various projects regarding brownfield redevelopment, including the impact of environmental insurance in the public and private sectors and policy incentives for redevelopment, a project that examines developers’ responses to market-based incentives geared toward brownfields redevelopment, and an inquiry into the different ways anti-smart growth rhetoric has been framed in different states. She has expertise in qualitative interviewing and in various types of survey construction and administration. Lauren has also an interest in the uses and abuses of the concept of social capital for housing policy and community development.

Currently, as PI, she is working with Metro Louisville and the Louisville Community Design Center to develop a community participatory model for workshops about brownfields redevelopment in socio-economically disadvantaged communities. This is an EPA funded grant. See www.redefiningbrownfields.org for more information.
Lauren received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at Rutgers University. Her dissertation examined the gender and social class composition of, and the social ties within, the Nazi Party membership in Munch, Germany from 1925 through 1929. Thus, organizational memberships, social movement participation, and collective action remain an active interest to her.

She has taught the following courses over the years both at Rutgers and at the University of Louisville:

Public Policy
Masters of Urban Planning Capstone
Environmental Policy
Public Policy Analysis and Program Evaluation
Principles and Concepts of Sociology
Social Science Research Methods
Introduction to Sociology
Sociology of Gender
Social Inequalities
Social Problems
Sociological Theory