Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Wood will become the new director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies of M.I.T. and Harvard.

Wood is expected to announce today at a news conference in Washington that he will accept the nomination made by the Presidents of the two universities and an Administrative committee.

Wood will replace Daniel P. Moynihan, professor of Education and Urban Politics who is leaving the Joint Center to become President-elect Nixon's special assistant for Urban Aairs. Two other associates of the Center will also work in Nixon's Administration, Edward C. Banfield, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Urban Government, and Martin Anderson.

Undersecretary of the housing agency since 1965, Wood was named to President Johnson's cabinet last week after Robert C. Weaver resigned to become president of Baruch College in New York.

As well as being director of the Joint Center, Wood will also be chairman of M.I.T.'s political science department.

The first three directors of the Joint Center have held professorships from Harvard. Wood will be the first director of the decade-old center to be from M.I.T.

Lloyd Rodwin, professor of City Planning at M.I.T. and chairman of the Joint Faculty Policy Committee for the Center said yesterday that forthcoming changes will result more from progress under way than from change in directorship.

"Some day there will be a statue to Stokely Carmichael in the Pantheon of Urbanists," Rodwin said. "He deserves a lot of the credit for making people aware of the sensitive issues of urban affairs," Rodwin added.

Rodwin said that the crises in the cities have brought more interest and money to the joint center.

"However, for the last two years, the director has found an increasingly limited amount of funds," Rodwin said. "The new director will find very little freedom unless he can find more money," he said.

"We are tremendously underfinanced and one of the important jobs of the new director will be to acquire and direct the use of new funds," Rodwin said.

Rodwin called claims by the Boston press that the Center would become computerized and concern itself more with the technological aspects of urban problems because of Wood's appointment "utter nonsense."

"Computerized research is not necessarily good research. We won't start using just another fancy tool," Rodwin said.

Rodwin said that the Wood-Moynihan switch in roles was "an accident of history."

"In Cambridge we have a great concentration of the limited number of first-rate people. It is not surprising that they should therefore move in and out of Washington," Rodwin said