The Department of Geography & Planning is proud to introduce and welcome three brilliant scholars — Alex Ramiller, Luisa Sotomayor, and Ghazal Fazli — to the tri-campus community.
Alex Ramiller
Alex Ramiller is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. His research uses large administrative datasets to explore the impact of housing policy and urban land use on the production of urban spatial inequality, with a particular focus on the relationship between neighborhood contexts and individual outcomes such as income, wealth, and debt. His research has examined a wide array of housing policy contexts and has employed data ranging from census microdata and housing subsidy records to consumer credit data and eviction court filings. He has also consulted on numerous projects at the intersection of data science and housing policy analysis for organizations including the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the City of Seattle.
Luisa Sotomayor
Luisa Sotomayor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning and Director of the Planning Program at the University of Toronto. She previously served as Director of the CITY Institute at York University and as Associate Professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York. Her research examines urban inequality from a governance and spatial planning perspective, with a particular focus on housing precarity, socio-legal exclusions, and the emergence of new socio-spatial peripheries in Latin America (notably Colombia and Mexico) and Canada. She also studies the role of activists, resident groups, and legal actors in mobilizing, negotiating, or contesting urban policies and planning agendas. Luisa has led several externally funded research projects. Currently, she is the principal investigator of the SSHRC Insight Grant Vertical Peripheries: Planning and Citizenship in Colombia’s Commodified Peri-Urban Housing Towers. She has published in leading journals such as the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Urban Geography, Housing Policy Debate, Antipode, and Cities. She holds degrees in Sociology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia (Bogota) and in Planning from the University of Toronto.
Ghazal Fazli
Ghazal Fazli joined the department of Department of Geography, Geomatics and Environment (GGE) at the University of Toronto Mississauga as an Assistant Professor and NovoNordisk Research Chair in Social and Environmental Determinants in July 2025. Dr. Ghazal Fazli has been with GGE as a CLTA and the Education Lead for the NovoNordisk Network for Healthy Populations for the last two years. Her research explores the impact of social, community, and environmental determinants of prediabetes and diabetes. Ghazal has been very active with capacity building, where she developed and led the Summer Research and Training program as well as the Graduate Award Program (which several of our GGE students have been successfully awarded!). At GGE, she has been very busy leading an active research program, supervising students, teaching in the human geography program, and contributing to the development of in-the-works health geography minor, among other things!