Julie Cidell is a native of the Chicago area with a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Minnesota. She has published papers on military base conversion, airport expansion, the suburban logistics landscape, the geography of chocolate, and green buildings. She has worked as a transportation engineer in Boston and taught physical geography in northern and southern California. Currently, she is a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her work focuses on two main areas. The first is critical geographies of transportation, including air transportation, freight and logistics, and suburban development. Her research projects across the U.S. have focused on the tension between global flows of people, goods, and vehicles, and the bounded nature of local territories. Second, she has studied urban governance and sustainability, including the book Imagining Sustainability: Creative Local Environmental Governance in Chicago and Melbourne.