Shin-pei’s experience converges on policy, design, and governance to shape inclusive and sustainable cities. She has spearheaded innovative approaches to systemic challenges across numerous urban issues, often with a focus on the public realm and transportation, at all levels of policy. Her intersectional work is infused with entrepreneurialism, building teams to co-create strategic research agendas, engagement, and tactics aimed at broad public impact and with multiple stakeholders. 

Prior to joining the City of Boston, she was the global policy director for cities and sustainability at Uber, where she was named a Sustainability Star by AdWeek for her work on the company’s first global sustainability commitment. She founded Make Public, a social impact analysis firm, and was executive director of Gehl Institute, a non-profit that advocated for public life and public spaces, where her team created a framework that integrated factors in the public realm with social determinants of health and equity that is now used widely by philanthropies. Shin-pei also served as deputy executive director of TransitCenter, a national foundation focused on improving urban transportation where she played a pivotal role defining the organization’s strategic direction on growing the transit civic ecosystem to lead policy reform. She created the Cities and Transportation program under the Energy and Climate Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace where she worked with Senator Bill Bradley, Secretary Tom Ridge, and Honorable Dave Walker on developing an innovative revenue mechanism to fund the federal transportation program. 

Shin-pei served on the NYC Public Design Commission as well as numerous non-profit boards including Transportation Alternatives, ioby, and SPUR, and taught urban design at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Art, and Preservation and Parsons School of Design at the New School. She holds a BA in government from Cornell University and a MSc in geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science.