Beth Moore Milroy, B.A. (McGill), M.Urbanisme (U. de Montréal), PhD (U. British Columbia), FCIP is Professor Emerita of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University where she was a past director of the School. Earlier, she headed the graduate planning program at the University of Waterloo. Despite a relatively short career in the field, she has taught and mentored hundreds of undergraduate, masters, and doctoral planning students. Actually, it wasn't her intention to be an urban planner or a professor. Both happened because of a series of chance encounters, life circumstances, travel, and residing in various places in and out of Canada that focused her curiosity on why some settlements thrive and others don't. She was gradually drawn ever deeper into the field, inspired along the way by many, including how Fellows such as Jeanne Wolfe, Len Gertler, and John van Nostrand approached their work. 
Beth has published many journal articles, reports, and books on connections among planning, gender, and ethnicity; on housing; and on core area redevelopment. She worked on social housing projects in Ottawa and Waterloo, and lobbied to retain strong national and provincial housing programs. She has chaired or otherwise participated on: Fellows selection, scholarship, planning awards, and conference committees for CIP and OPPI; editorial boards of journals; awards and scholarship committees for CMHC, Canadian and foreign universities, and the major Canadian, Québec, and British funders of academic planning and geographic research. At conferences and elsewhere, she seeks to promote understanding between practicing and academic planners, and between anglophone and francophone planning approaches. For the record, Beth was apparently the first Canadian to earn both a master's and a doctoral degree in planning from Canadian universities. Her current research includes continuing a project Jeanne Wolfe started to locate, describe, and explain the host of utopian settlements in Canada prior to 1945.