Professor tapped to comment on U.S. presidential election to foreign embassies, lecture on American suburbs in Paris

Robert Lang, co-director of the Metropolitan Institute, an Alexandria, Va.-based center of Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies, who is consulted frequently by the national media, including USA Today and The New York Times, on topics relating to demographics, housing and the built environment, and metropolitan governance, is being tapped to inform Western European audiences.

Today, Lang will address several European ambassadors in Washington D.C., at the invitation of the Austrian ambassador on the subject of the U.S. presidential election. In May, Lang will travel to Paris, France, to lecture on American suburbs at the École Normale Supérieure via a Fulbright grant.

Lang is an associate professor of urban affairs and planning in the School of Public and International Affairs in Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture and Urban Studies. He is also editor of the scholarly journal Housing Policy Debate and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C., an Urban Land Institute Fellow, a Planning and Development Fellow of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and a Visiting Fellow of the University of California. He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Rutgers University.

The College of Architecture and Urban Studies is composed of four schools: the School of Architecture + Design, including architecture, industrial design, interior design and landscape architecture; the School of Public and International Affairs, including urban affairs and planning, public administration and policy and government and international affairs; the Myers-Lawson School of Construction, which includes building construction in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and construction engineering management in the College of Engineering; and the School of the Visual Arts, including programs in studio art, visual communication and art history.