ericmorris3@gmail.com
Bio
Eric Morris is a transportation scholar at UCLA. He hails from Deerfield, IL, a suburb of Chicago. He attended Deerfield High School. As a child and teenager he worked as a professional actor, appearing in regional musical theater productions of Oliver!, Camelot, and Annie Get Your Gun.
Eric attended Harvard, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in History and Literature. He specialized in 17th century English history and wrote his senior thesis on the foundation of the Bank of England. While in college he was a writer for Let’s Go: Europe with a beat in still-communist Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. He also appeared in two Hasty Pudding Theatricals productions and wrote for the Harvard Crimson. His most notable accomplishment during this period was driving Michael Jordan’s cars.
After college Eric relocated to Los Angeles where he wrote and produced for television. His writing credits include episodes of Star Trek: Voyager, JAG, Xena: Warrior Princess, The Pretender and Outer Limits. He created the comedy/action series Jack of All Trades, which starred Bruce Campbell as a spy fighting the Napoleonic Empire.
Eric holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA's Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and its Institute for Transportation Studies; he is also a Lecturer in its Department of Urban Planning.
Eric's interests include the relationship between urban conditions, transportation and life outcomes; transportation equity; transportation and disadvantaged populations; transportation history; and transportation finance, economics, and management. He also has interests in economic geography and environmental economics.
Eric is co-authoring a book on the history and financing of the freeway system with Professor Taylor and Professor Jeffrey R. Brown of Florida State University; it will be published by the University of Chicago Press. Eric's dissertation research centered on transportation, land use, the urban environment and overall well-being, particularly that of low-income families.
Eric is a regular contributor to the Freakonomics blog, including for a 2 1/2 year stint on the New York Times website. He has also authored or co-authored several papers in academic journals. In addition, he currently serves as associate editor of Access magazine.
When not using statistical methods to analyze traveling, Eric enjoys using statistical methods to analyze traveling – as in the "traveling" violation on the basketball court. For the 2009-2010 NBA season, Eric wrote about pro basketball on a weekly basis for the NBA's website, nba.com. His focus was the fantasy game, of which he is a rabid player. Eric also curates a decent-sized Grateful Dead bootleg collection.
Eric is single and lives in Sherman Oaks, California.
ACADEMIC CV
COMPLETE TELEVISION WRITING CREDITS
JACK OF ALL TRADES
LINKS TO SELECTED BROADCASTS &
PUBLICATIONS
