Will Cohen
Senior Planner, Zoning Reform at Boston Planning & Development Agency
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolWill Cohen is a senior urban planner with 11 years of experience shaping zoning and development policy in Boston, currently leading zoning reform at the Boston Planning & Development Agency. Trained at Harvard GSD (MUP) and the University of Chicago, he blends design-forward planning with rigorous policy and data analysis from roles at Utile, Supernormal, and DHIC. He co-founded a planning practice and has led multidisciplinary teams to translate complex regulatory goals into practical, implementable plans. An active contributor to open-source GIS (notably enhancing color vision deficiency simulations in the flagship QGIS project), he brings a rare mix of technical GIS proficiency and policy-level zoning expertise. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic solutions that balance equity, design, and technical accuracy.
11 years of coding experience
MUP, Urban Planning, MUP, Urban Planning at Harvard University Graduate School of DesignBA, Sociology, English Language and Literature, BA, Sociology, English Language and Literature at University of Chicago
Github Skills (6)
c-language10
gis10
cprogramming-language10
front-end-development10
qt10
qgis10
Programming languages (23)
Github contributions (5)
qgis/QGIS
Sep 2020 - Oct 2020
QGIS is a free, open source, cross platform (lin/win/mac) geographical information system (GIS)
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:7 reviews, 8 commits, 1 PR in 1 month
Contributions summary:Will primarily contributed to the QGIS project by implementing and refining color vision deficiency (CVD) simulation features. They developed new CVD modes, refactored and improved existing grayscale and LMS-based simulations, and updated the code to match methodologies in Chromium and Firefox. Their work involved modifying core application files and GUI components to integrate the CVD functionality, as well as reverting changes to maintain API compatibility.
geographical-information-systemgisqgis
willcohen/nixpkgs
Dec 2021 - Apr 2026
Nix Packages collection
Contributions:293 pushes, 145 branches in 4 years 4 months
nixosnix-packages
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