Special Topic Classes Description Fall 2022

Harley Cooper is a Senior Operations Planner with SEPTA’s Service Planning Department where she coordinates short-range planning for three bus districts and manages the development of new transit modes for SEPTA’s family of transit services, including microtransit and Direct Bus. Prior to starting at SEPTA, she worked as a planning consultant at Foursquare Integrated Transportation Planning and a researcher at the Center for Neighborhood Technology and the National Center for Safe Routes to School. Harley holds a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Marisa Denker is the founder and CEO of Connect the Dots. Evolving from Marisa’s Fulbright project in 2014, Connect the Dots now operates across the East Coast in the US and continues to have a sister branch in Dublin, Ireland. Marisa brings deep expertise in engagement design, design thinking, inclusive public outreach, strategic communications, stakeholder management, and project management. She holds an MA in Design Practice from Dublin University (via her Fulbright fellowship) and a BA Urban Studies and English from University of Pennsylvania where she graduated as Phi Beta Kappa. Marisa additionally serves as an adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania of her course Participatory Cities. She also co-founded A Playful City, a nonprofit in Ireland focused on co-creating playful, inclusive public spaces for all ages.

Lily Goodspeed is a Senior Associate at Connect the Dots and most recently worked at SEAMAAC as Community Building and Planning Coordinator in South Philadelphia. Before that, she worked as Outreach Coordinator at scout (the urban design firm redeveloping the Bok building) and at Philly 3.0. In 2020, she completed a Masters at Fels Institute of Government at the University of Pennsylvania and has a Bachelor of Arts from Brown University. She has also worked in real estate, adaptive reuse development, marketing, communications, and community organizing in Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Mexico City. On the weekends, she writes comics, volunteers, explores, and runs a street art project called Plaque to the Future.