Angie Donelson, BA, MRCP, Ph.D.
President, Donelson Consulting LLC (self-employed)

Angie has more than 20 years of experience as a city and regional planner, geographer, and consultant helping organizations address human service needs and challenges in cross-cultural contexts.

Dr Donelson earned her Ph.D. in economic geography from the University of Arizona, her master’s degree in regional and community planning from Kansas State University, and her BA degrees in journalism and political science from the University of Arizona. She also completed postgraduate training at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. Dr. Donelson is certified by the American Planning Association as a professional regional and community planner (AICP). She has co-authored two books published by the University of Arizona Press on US-Mexico border community development as well as peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters on the subject.

As a city planner in local and regional government and the private sector in New Jersey, Kansas, and Arizona, Dr Donelson developed and managed comprehensive community plans and various housing, community development, and economic development plans and projects. She then worked for five years as the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s representative to Arizona’s colonias, assisting dozens of underprivileged, rural US-Mexico border and farmworker communities with infrastructure needs. As a professional geographer, she has used geographic and social science methods and tools to help binational and community foundations, not-for-profit organizations, and state, regional, and local governments in Kenya, Mexico, Arizona, California, and Washington D.C. plan, finance, implement, and evaluate community and economic development programs.

In her presentation, Dr Donelson will discuss career paths in human geography and how her own career benefitted from training in geography. She will talk about emerging opportunities in the field, drawing from a book chapter she co-authored in 2012 funded by the National Science Foundation, in Practicing Geography: Careers for Enhancing Society and the Environment / Association of American Geographers.