Mark Alan Hughes

Penn Energy Expert

Director Emeritus

Mark Alan Hughes is the founding faculty director and current director emeritus of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. He was a professor of practice in regional planning and energy policy appointed in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He was also a faculty fellow of the Penn Institute for Urban Research and a research fellow of the Wharton Risk Center. Hughes is the author and performer of the 2021 audiobook Livable Cities.

Hughes joined the standing faculty of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 1986 at the age of 25 and joined the associated faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He has published in the leading journals of economic geography, urban economics, political science, policy analysis, and won the National Planning Award for his research in city and regional planning in 1992.

He was chief policy adviser to Mayor Michael A. Nutter and the founding director of sustainability for the City of Philadelphia, where he led the creation of the Greenworks Plan in 2009. He has designed and fielded national policy research projects in a variety of areas including the Bridges to Work program in transportation, the Transitional Work Corporation in job training and placement, the Campaign for Working Families in EITC participation, and the Energy Efficient Buildings Hub in regional economic development. This work has been funded by H.U.D., H.H.S., D.O.E., Ford, Rockefeller, Pew, Casey, WmPenn, and others.

He was the inaugural nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Urban and Metropolitan Policy founded by Bruce Katz; the first vice president of policy development at the national intermediary Public/Private Ventures established by the Ford Foundation in Philadelphia; and a weekly opinion columnist for five years at the Philadelphia Daily News, where he was named one the best columnists in the U.S. by The Week magazine in 2004.

Hughes earned a Ph.D. in regional science from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986, and a B.A. in religion and art history from Swarthmore College in 1981.