ABSTRACT
Social scientist Karen A. Franck is Director of the Joint PhD Program in Urban Systems sponsored by the NJIT and Rutgers University-Newark, currently composed of one track in Urban Environment in the College of Architecture and Design at NJIT and one in Global Urban Studies in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers. Franck reflected on her career as a social scientist, first teaching undergraduate and graduate students in architecture and then teaching and advising PhD students. She continuously emphasizes the importance of developing clear empirical questions to guide research, along with identifying the kinds of information needed to answer those questions and how that information will be collected. She also acknowledged how much the topics of the books she has written were inspired by what she observed teaching in an architecture school.
