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Shin-pei Tsay

Chief Research and Data Officer

Shin-pei's experience convenes policy, data, design, and governance to bolster inclusive and sustainable cities. She has spearheaded innovative and intersectional approaches to systemic challenges across numerous urban issues, often with a focus on the public realm and transportation. Her work is infused with entrepreneurialism and partnership, building teams to co-create strategic research agendas, engagement, and tactics that empower communities to thrive. Shin-pei joined Boston's Innovation and Technology Cabinet in 2025 and continues to serve as the executive director for the Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics.

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 nonprofit focusing on public life to generate designs, plans, and governance for cities. At the Gehl Institute, Shin-pei led the creation of the open Public Life Data Protocol—a set of metrics on how to collect, organize, and share data about how people relate to public space. Throughout her career, she has authored reports, frameworks, and articles highlighting the importance of the civic sector in policy development.

Shin-pei also served as deputy executive director of TransitCenter, a national foundation focused on improving urban transportation where she played a pivotal role in 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 also organized a global convening with the World Bank and Organization of American States, transit agencies, and open data leaders to adopt General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) as the open data standard for transit data.

Shin-pei served on the NYC Public Design Commission as well as numerous nonprofit boards including Transportation Alternatives, 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 an MSc in geography from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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