Karen Chapple, Ph.D., is a Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Chapple, who holds the Carmel P. Friesen Chair in Urban Studies, studies the governance, planning, and development of regions in the U.S. and Latin America, with a focus on housing and economic development. Her recent book (Routledge, 2015) is entitled Planning Sustainable Cities and Regions: Towards More Equitable Development. She is currently finishing two books: Transit-Oriented Displacement? The Effects of Smarter Growth on Communities (with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, MIT Press, 2018), and Fragile Governance and Local Economic Development: Evidence from Peripheral Regions in Latin America (with Sergio Montero, Routledge, 2018). She has most recently published on job creation on industrial land (in Economic Development Quarterly), regional governance in rural Peru (in the Journal of Rural Studies), and accessory dwelling units as a smart growth policy (in the Journal of Urbanism). In Fall 2015, she co-founded the Urban Displacement Project, a research portal examining patterns of residential, commercial, and industrial displacement, as well as policy and planning solutions. In 2015, Chapple's work on climate change and tax policy won the UC-wide competition for the Bacon Public Lectureship, which promotes evidence-based public policy and creative thinking for the public good. Chapple also received the 2017 UC-Berkeley Chancellor's Award for Research in the Public Interest.

As a faculty affiliate of the Institute of Governmental Studies, Chapple is currently engaged in research projects related to sustainability planning, specifically, on residential and commercial/industrial displacement. Since 2006, she has served as faculty director of the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation, which has provided over $1.5 million in technical assistance to community-based organizations and government agencies.