Faculty Members
Alberta School of Business has an esteemed Marketing, Business Economics, and Law (MBEL) department with highly distinguished urban economics scholars. The academic strength of MRED is built on the faculty’s scholarship and achievements, in addition to the high quality industry practitioners participating in all MRED courses.
Along with instructors of core and elective classes, MRED students get to know the extended faculty members through experiential learning opportunities and Cities Institute programming.
David Dale-Johnson
Professor David Dale-Johnson is the Stan Melton Executive Professor in Real Estate at the Alberta School of Business and the Academic Director of the Cities Institute. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of California at Berkeley and has taught at UBC, Cal Berkeley, USC and Peking University. An expert in real estate economics, finance and city-building, he teaches real estate economics, investment, finance and development. As well as teaching and research, he has worked as a real estate consultant and as an executive in the real estate business. David is committed to using his expertise to build collaboration in the business of city building.
Murtaza Haider: Academic director, MRED
Murtaza Haider is a professor and the Radhe Krishna Gupta Executive Chair in Cities and Communities in the Alberta School of Business at the University of Alberta.
As the executive director of the Cities Institute at the U of A, his work helps bridge the gap between data-driven insights and real-world city-building strategies, shaping the future of urban development in Canada and globally. In his position as executive chair of the institute, Haider serves as a convenor of U of A expertise around industry-identified challenges, positioning Alberta as a leader in creating real-world solutions that make our cities more vibrant, sustainable and inclusive.
A professor in the department of marketing, business economics, and law at the Alberta School of Business, Haider’s research interests include business analytics, data science, housing market dynamics, transportation, infrastructure, urban planning and human development in Canada and South Asia.
Urban economics faculty members
Sidharth Moktan’s research focuses on household finance and real estate finance. His current work examines how financial frictions shape housing market outcomes and how housing is owned, financed, and valued as an asset. He earned his PhD in economics from London School of Economics.
Sahil Raina is an associate professor of finance at the University of Alberta’s Alberta School of Business. His research studies household finance, politics and finance, entrepreneurship, competition. He completed his PhD in finance from the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan in 2016.
Nathan (Nate) Schiff is an associate professor in the MBEL department. Schiff started his career as an assistant professor at the Sauder School of Business at UBC (Vancouver), where he taught real estate economics. He then moved to Shanghai, China where he was an associate professor at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics and taught PhD urban economics. His research spans urban economics, public economics, and industrial organization, with a focus on how geography affects the characteristics of markets and economic outcomes. A current focus of his research is on immigration and the housing market.
Yanhao Wang earned his Ph.D. in Business from the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University. Before that, he graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a Bachelor's Degree in Finance and a Master's degree in Economics. His research focuses on topics in household finance, health economics, and industrial organization.
Affiliated faculty members
Dr. Sandeep Agrawal is a Professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. He was an Associate Chair in the department and Inaugural director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning between 2013 and 2023. Dr. Agrawal has a diverse array of research interests that encompasses sustainable urban and rural planning, energy transition, Indigenous issues, and human rights. As an accomplished author with over a hundred articles and professional reports and three books, Dr. Agrawal has contributed to planning practice and affected city bylaws and planning policies and legislation, with a lens on human rights and equity.
Dr. Elmond Bandauko is an Assistant Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta and the Research Lead of the Informality and Everyday Urbanism Lab (INFELA). He holds a PhD in Geography and Environment from the University of Western Ontario, where he received the Governor General’s Gold Medal for outstanding academic excellence, and he previously completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Just and Equitable Cities at Cornell University’s Mui Ho Center for Cities.
An interdisciplinary human geographer and critical urban scholar, Dr. Bandauko’s research focuses on urban informality and everyday urbanism in Global South cities, urban inclusion and marginalization, urban transformation, and the built environment’s role in shaping quality of life. His work appears in leading journals such as Urban Geography, Political Geography, Geoforum, Environment and Planning D, and Urban Affairs Review.
His research has been supported by SSHRC, IDRC, and the IJURR Foundation. Internationally, Dr. Bandauko has contributed chapters to multiple UN-Habitat World Cities Reports, including those on urban poverty, inequality, climate action, and housing. He is also a Research Affiliate with the Informal Sustainability Lab at the University of Michigan.
Dr. Akaabre is an assistant professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning and the director of the Cities and Spatial Justice Lab at the University of Alberta. He received his PhD from the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP) at the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining the University of Alberta, Dr. Akaabre worked with the School of Cities at the University of Toronto as Postdoctoral Fellow and Curriculum Lead, where he facilitated a series of workshops for the Equitable Development Data Insight Training Initiative (EDDIT), providing data analysis and storytelling training to non-profit, community, and government organizations working toward urban equity in small- and mid-sized cities in the United States and Canada. He also led and contributed to several research projects at the School of Cities, primarily on evaluating potential solutions to the continent’s affordable housing crisis.
His research centres on the broad spectrum of housing development, finance, and justice, and on how current planning systems and practices shape (in)equitable development and spatial (in)justice. This includes models of housing (re)development and financing mechanisms, pro forma analysis, housing inclusion and exclusion (discrimination), displacement, ghettoization, and homelessness, as well as decolonization and redevelopment of aging, unjust, and racially marginalized communities. Additional areas include municipal finance and governance, healthy and equitable cities, land governance and property rights, the impacts of climate change and migration on key socioeconomic fabrics of the city (including housing, livelihoods, food security, etc.), and the e
Dr. Emily Grisé is an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta. Her research focuses on transportation equity, adoption of low emission public transit buses, local and regional transport and land use planning and modeling, and public transit planning and operations. She works closely with public transit agencies to co-develop evidence-based policies that enhance service delivery and operations, with sustainability integrated into all decision-making processes. She currently leads a funded research program involving 14 partners—including public transit agencies, government ministries, and transportation planning authorities across Canada—focused on understanding and addressing the public transit needs of Canadian women. In parallel, she works with several transit agencies in both Canada and the U.S. to examine the implementation of alternative propulsion bus systems—such as battery electric and compressed natural gas buses—to support effective planning and future fleet decisions.
Dr. Mustafa Gül is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta. Dr. Gül’s current research focuses mainly on developing novel technologies for smart, sustainable, and resilient cities and societies by developing technologies for Crowdsensing-based Monitoring of Built and Natural Environments (CoMBiNE). In addition, Dr. Gül investigates various topics, such as efficient integration of solar PV Systems into energy-efficient buildings and community-wide and city-wide solar PV applications. Dr. Gül has led more than 25+ large-scale research projects in the infrastructure and energy areas funded by various federal and provincial organizations and industry partners, and he has published 90+ journal papers and 100+ conference papers in the areas of infrastructure and energy.
Dr. Tae J. Kwon joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alberta as an Assistant Professor in August 2016 after earning his award-winning Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo and has since advanced to Associate Professor. Dr. Kwon's research covers a wide range of topics such as intelligent transportation systems, winter road maintenance, facility location optimization, geospatial information sciences and geostatistics, remote sensing, and traffic safety. One of his latest multi-phase research projects involves analyzing various winter transportation-related issues including road surface conditions monitoring and prediction using heuristics and deep learning to enhance safety and mobility for winter travelers while collaborating with numerous transportation agencies across North America.
Dr. Lee is an Associate Professor in the Division of Preventive Medicine, Department of Medicine at the University of Alberta, and a Medical Officer of Health (Provincial Public and Population Health) with Alberta Health Services. She is cross-appointed as an Adjunct Professor at University of Alberta's School of Public Health. She also teaches for the University of Alberta School of Urban & Regional Planning, and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City (NYC). Her courses at the University of Alberta include: MED 585, PLAN 585 and PLAN 485, which covers the topic of Health and Urban Planning. Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health also offers Dr. Lee's Designing Healthy Cities course as part of their EPIC Summer Institute.
Dr. Lee is a world-renowned expert in creating Fit Cities and served as NYC’s Inaugural Healthy Built Environment and Active Design Director, and Deputy to the Assistant Commissioner for Chronic Disease Prevention and Control. She has worked for the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity & Obesity. Her work to create Active Cities: A Guide for City Leaders helped to inspire Edmonton’s Live Active Strategy. She was the recipient of the 2017 Canadian Institute of Planners President’s Award. She is the author of the book Fit Cities published by Penguin Random House.
Robert (Bob) Summers is a professor and director of the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Alberta. He is also the academic director of the Sustainability Council where he has led the development of sustainability programming across the university. Dr. Summers’ work focuses on the institutional, policy, and economic dimensions of cities and sustainability. His research and teaching examine how planning, governance, regulation, and infrastructure shape urban development, housing affordability, community vitality, and long-term sustainability outcomes.