MIT professor to deliver Jaffe Lecture on Sept. 19 at Penn State Smeal

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. –– Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at the Center for Real Estate within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will deliver the sixth Austin J. Jaffe Real Estate Lecture. The lecture, titled “How the First U.S.-China Trade War Reshaped Vietnam’s Economic Geography and Environmental Performance," will take place from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Sept. 19 in 118 Agricultural Sciences and Industries Building at Penn State University Park.

“We are very pleased to have Siqi Zheng visit us and give this year’s Jaffe Memorial Lecture,” said Brent Ambrose, Jason and Julie Borrelli Faculty Chair in Real Estate, director of Smeal’s Borrelli Institute for Real Estate Studies and professor of real estate. “Professor Zheng is an internationally recognized expert in urban and environmental economics. Her research is at the forefront of efforts to understand how real estate development can be responsive to needs for greater environmental sustainability.”

Zheng is the faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate. She established the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019 and the MIT China Future City Lab in 2017.

Zheng served as president of the Asian Real Estate Society from 2018-19 and is serves on its board now. She is also on the board of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association.

She is the co-editor of the Journal of Regional Science, and Environmental and Resource Economics. She is also the associated editor of China Economic Review and Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Real Estate Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of the American Planning Association.

Zheng’s field of specialization is urban and environmental economics and policy, including environmental sustainability, and place-based policies and self-sustaining urban growth.

Her research has been published in a host of peer reviewed international journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Geography, European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning A, Ecological Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Real Estate Economics and Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics.

The Austin Jaffe Real Estate Lecture Series honors the late Austin Jaffe, who was the Philip H. Sieg Professor of Business Administration at the Smeal College of Business and served as the associate dean for international programs, the associate director of what is now known as the Borrelli Institute for Real Estate Studies and chair of the Department of Risk Management before retiring after nearly 40 years at Penn State. Jaffe passed away in May 2019. 

As a forerunner in real estate studies, Jaffe’s legacy lives on in the series, which brings renowned real estate scholars to Penn State to share their knowledge and explore industry topics with students.

The Jaffe family’s endowment makes the series possible, which kicked off its inaugural event in 2021 with speaker Abdullah Yavas, Robert E. Wangard Real Estate Chair at the University of Wisconsin School of Business. Since then, it has welcomed:

• Gilles Duranton, Dean’s Chair in Real Estate and professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business
• Wenlan Qian, Ng Teng Fong Chair Professor in Real Estate and professor at the National University of Singapore
• Susan Wachter, the Albert Sussman Professor of Real Estate and professor of finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business
• Piet Eichholtz, professor of real estate and finance at Maastricht University in the Netherlands