Jacob Koch leads client engagements with city governments on a range of environmental projects, including tree planting and greening, food policy, and solid waste management.

Previously, Jacob worked for the Office of Healthcare Transformation and Innovation at the Greater Los Angeles Veterans Administration where he led a long-range strategic planning process for the comprehensive homeless program and forged new partnerships to better integrate patient-centered care, expand housing options, and provide legal services to homeless veterans. Prior to that, Jacob worked for EMBARQ Brasil in Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro where he directed a project to insert sustainable mobility into a citywide infrastructure and neighborhood upgrading program and led one of the first studies to generate empirical data on transportation use in Rio’s favelas.

Jacob has a B.A. in Political Science from Yale University and a Master in Urban Planning from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. At the GSD he was part of a planning studio that was awarded the 2015 National Student Project Award.  He is on the advisory boards of Yale/City, CUNY Guttman Community College Urban Studies program, and the Emerging Leaders Council of the Regional Plan Association.  He is a Critic at the Yale School of Architecture where he teaches in the Urban Studies program.