José Gámez is a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UNC Charlotte. He is currently the Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Programs in the College of Arts + Architecture at Charlotte and he has served as the Interim Director and as the Associate Director of the School of Architecture.  He has also been a Research Fellow with both UNC Charlotte’s Institute for Social Capital and Urban Institute. He served as a Provost’s Faculty Fellow and he was the recipient of the 2015 Provost’s Award for Community Engagement.  His work has been published in both books and journals such as: Places: A Forum of Environmental Design, The Journal of Urbanism, The Journal of Applied Geography, The Plan Journal as well as the books Writing Urbanism: A Design Reader, Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism, Charlotte, NC: The Global Rise of a New South City.  He is also the co-editor of Rio de Janeiro: Urban Expansion and Environment and Vertical Urbanism: Designing Compact Cities in China. Prior to joining the faculty at UNC Charlotte, he taught at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas where his design studios explored the changing character of the Las Vegas Strip and historic Las Vegas and he collaborated on a grant-supported initiative titled “Re-Learning from Las Vegas” to which Denise Scott-Brown and Steven Izenour contributed.  He received his Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M, his Master of Architecture from UC Berkeley, and his Ph.D. in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of California at Los Angeles.