Our Team / Lillian Liang
Lillian is an urban planner with expertise in equitable climate adaptation to support the Better World Group’s clean energy and climate resilience practices.
Prior to joining Better World Group, Lillian worked in community-driven climate resilience research. Lillian contributed to outreach and capacity building for community-led wildfire resilience organizations as a Climate Action Corps Fellow at the California Fire Safe Council. There, she co-authored a state landscape report on community wildfire resilience organizations and presented at the 2021 UCLA Luskin Climate Adaptation Symposium.
Lillian completed her UCLA Luskin Fellowship with the Greenlining Institute, where she authored an extreme heat policy white paper, focusing on concerns raised by immigrant, labor, and environmental justice communities in Pomona and San Gabriel Valleys in Eastern LA County. As a graduate student researcher at the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, she interviewed Transformative Climate Communities partners and participants across the state, contributing to grant process findings and recommendations for the California Strategic Growth Council. Lillian has a background in engineering, and has worked on projects in building energy auditing, energy efficiency, and renewable energy feasibility analysis.
Lillian is excited about planning interventions that highlight felt, forgotten, and invisibilized experiences of the built environment. For her master's capstone, she worked with a community collaborative to publish a mutual aid newspaper highlighting issues of unhoused self-determination in LA. She's also worked on projects including a planning history of the El Segundo Chevron refinery, a Sea Level Rise Story Slam, and a student-led abolition and urban planning learning space. She hopes to continue to work creatively to generate an expansive, imaginative, and liberatory planning practice.
Lillian holds a Master of Urban and Regional Planning from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering (General) from Harvey Mudd College. In her spare time, Lillian likes to be outdoors, listen to music, and drink tea.