Julian Wolpert

Julian Wolpert (born 1932) is Bryant Professor Emeritus of Geography, Public Affairs, and Urban Planning at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School, where he taught from 1973-2005 and chaired the Program in Urban and Regional Planning. He was previously a member of the Regional Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania (1963-73). He is a graduate of Columbia University (BA) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, MS & PhD (Geography). He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and AAAS. He has been a fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral and Social Sciences, and the Woodrow Wilson Center and has been a Guggenheim fellow. Wolpert is a nationally cited scholar in the fields of location theory, urban development, migration, public and social services, and the nonprofit sector.and charity and philanthropy in the United States, and has testified before Congress. He has challenged conservatives who believe that charity is the best way to care for the needy and poor. Wolpert served as Vice President, then President of the Association of American Geographers and Vice President of the Regional Science Association and was elected to the American Institute of Certified Planners.

Wolpert's earliest research focused on testing social theory based upon spatial data, losses in productivity related to environmental risk and imperfect information, the migration decision, the relation between commuting and migration, locating amenity and "nimby" facilities, disaster evacuation, and the closing of mental health facilities. More recently, his studies concerned the nonprofit marketplace in cities, nonprofit service representation and saturation of neighborhoods, locational variations in generosity, distributional effects of foundations, the fiscal viability of nonprofits, and methods for planning for evaluating nonprofit organizations and foundations.