By Edward M. Bury, APR, MA (aka The PRDude)
Engaging with fascinating and intelligent people ranks as the most rewarding aspect of my current position managing communications (and more) for a major university transportation research unit. The subject of today’s Q&A profile certainly ranks way, way up there on my roster of interesting and way cool people.
I recall first meeting Dr. Em Hall some eight years ago when she joined our team as a research assistant. Since then, Em earned her doctorate degree, received the Dwight D. Eisenhower Transportation Fellowship, cultivated a side career as a group fitness instructor, and built Em + H Chicago LLC, a successful diversified strategic consultancy that centers on transportation, higher education, communications and product/project management. Oh yes: In 2026, Em will serve as President of the annual Transport Chicago conference. (Full disclosure: I have served on the Transport Chicago Steering Committee for a dozen years. Read this post from last June for some further insight.)
Okay passengers: Next stop, thoughts from Em Hall.
1. Your impressive career has centered on communications. What led you to pursue — and succeed — in this field?
Well, first of all, thank you for the compliment. My career path has been far from linear, and I certainly didn’t grow up to be the paleontologist I dreamed of becoming as a kid. However, I had an early boss who saw real potential in my writing skills and tapped me for a role in the marketing department at a nonprofit where I had started out in fundraising. While at that job, I became an early adopter of social media and blogging, which ultimately transformed the trajectory of my career. A little over a decade ago, I obtained a certificate in Integrated Marketing and Communications from the University of Chicago’s Graham School, which further developed my skills and expanded my network.
Looking back, that initial transition to marketing and comms made sense: I’d always loved writing and fancied myself an effective communicator from a young age. As I’ve continued to build my own business, which has evolved into focusing on communications for the transportation and urban planning sectors, I still draw on many of the fundamentals I learned from that early boss and the certificate program.
2. While maintaining your own consultancy and working in a full-time position, you decided to take on the challenge of earning your doctorate degree. What prompted you to make this personal and professional commitment?
If there’s been one constant in my life, it’s a love of transportation and trains in particular, for which I credit my dad. He was a top repairman for Lionel, so I grew up around model trains in the house, as well as real trains during family vacations. While living in DC after my first round of grad school, I had a short stint as a federal contractor. The most dull job in my life. I had downtime and decided to put it to good use by riding the DC Metro after work and on weekends, then writing up my adventures in blog posts during the day (yes, work was really that slow!). The blog became somewhat of a hit, and when I moved back to Chicago a few years later, the joy of exploring and writing about transit stuck with me. I realized that urban planning would be a great direction to take my career in, as I could utilize my marketing and communications skills in a different sector.
3. What was the greatest challenge you encountered while pursuing your doctoral degree? And, what advice or insight can you share with other scholars?
For those thinking about a Ph.D.: don’t do it! Ha – just kidding. I would say definitely do it, as long as you know your “why.” I applied and accepted, knowing that the academic path was unlikely to be the one I would pursue. My goal was to acquire subject matter expertise in an area that I was passionate about – transportation – that would enable me to pivot my consulting business to focus on that field. Is going through a Ph.D. program the most efficient way to make a career change? Absolutely not! But it worked for me because a) I have an ego and wanted to be called “Dr. Em” on occasion, and b) I was in the fortunate position to work for myself and could therefore control my time and workload in a way that made it possible to layer on another round of grad school.
The greatest challenge, without a doubt, was writing the dissertation. Not the words and sentences, per se, but just being able to sit down and put aside everything else (mostly work stuff) for extended periods of time in order to give the paper the focus it deserved. I ended up getting a co-working space for about six months in order to leave the house, turn off notifications, and give the dissertation work the deep focus it requires.
4. Your expertise centers on urban planning and transportation. Share three key issues facing urban planners in the years ahead.
From what I’m observing in my consulting work, the work of planners is more visible than ever. But that doesn’t mean that what planners do is necessarily well understood, which is where communicators like me come in! One trend I’m noticing, which is a positive one, is that planners and engineers are collaborating more than ever on transportation initiatives. And if they aren’t yet quite as in synch as they’d like to be, these two groups are making concerted efforts in both the public and private sectors to break down silos that, I would argue, have built up over time as those disciplines have diverged at the academic level.
Another issue is finding planners and planning opportunities in unexpected places. This is a good thing as well. For example, as part of a podcast I co-host for the American Planning Association, I had the opportunity to learn about the work of a pastor who is also a planner, focusing on how houses of worship can serve as anchor institutions and neutral meeting grounds for community planning discussions. She also calls those institutions to task for not always being the most generous neighbors in terms of land use and other planning practices. I think we’ll continue to see more of this.
In terms of transportation planning in particular, I’m already glued to my television, so to speak, on the topic of congestion pricing. We will likely see many dissertations on this topic in the next five to ten years, and I want to read them all.
5. Now to an entirely different topic. Sources tell me — okay, you’ve told me and I’ve visited your website — that you are a fan of Felis catus, better known as a domestic or house cat. Why the fondness for feline friends?
I think the real question is, why not? I’ve been a cat owner for two decades now, and through thick and thin, dissertations and deadlines, my cats have been an unwavering source of furry fun. They’re not much for riding public transit, however. That’s the only shortcoming I can think of.
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