Daniel Hess is professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at UB, where he served as chairperson from 2017 through 2022. Central to Hess's research is addressing interactions between housing, transportation, land use, and other public concerns. He develops new pathways for understanding the complex socio-economic and ethnic landscape of cities and spatial inequalities. He also explores equal access to resources from urban neighborhoods, focusing especially on the changes in gay neighborhoods as the LGBTQ+ population diffuses to other metropolitan locations.

Hess guides his research, scholarship and teaching with a drive to understand cities as more walkable and suitable to the mobility needs of all ages, a passion he connects to his upbringing in Kenmore, a first-ring suburb of Buffalo with ‘old urbanism’ features. His interests were further defined while working in Boca Raton, Florida. Walking to work one day along a busy, multi-lane highway he was stopped by a police officer concerned with his safety (because he was walking, not driving). According to Hess, “I then knew I wanted to pursue a career in urban planning so that I could help educate the next generation of urban planners with a holistic understanding of urban transportation systems that don't favor the automobile system over other modes of travel.”

A member of the faculty since 2002 and former chairperson of the department, Hess is also a 1997 graduate of UB's Master of Urban Planning program. 

• BS (civil and environmental engineering), Clarkson University
• MUP, University at Buffalo, State University of New York
• MSW, Arizona State University
• PhD (urban planning), University of California, Los Angeles

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellowship
• Fulbright Scholar Award, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
• Fulbright Scholar Award, Kraków University of Technology, Poland
• Baltic-American Freedom Foundation Fellowship
• UB Gender Institute Scholar
• National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Scholar at Columbia University
• UB Presidential Commission on Academic Excellence and Equity
• Chester Rapkin Prize, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning
• UB Exceptional Scholar Award
• Dwight D. Eisenhower Fellow, Federal Highway Administration

Hess regularly consults with federal, state, and local agencies so that his research can lead to more effective urban planning. In recognition of his mentorship of urban planning students and distinguished leadership in the urban planning community, he won the Michael Krasner Professional Planner Award for the American Planning Association (Western New York Section). Projects emanating from studio-workshop courses he taught won his students awards from the American Planning Association. He engages in outreach activities that mutually benefit the scholarly community, the professional community, and public agencies.