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A former mayor and an expert on ancient Rome are are among eight new faculty members joining the Harvard Graduate School of Design for the 2024-25 academic year, the school announced this summer.

Seven of the new faculty members assumed their posts in July, while the eighth, Rachel N. Weber, will join the school this January.

In a statement, GSD Dean Sarah Whiting wrote that she is “thrilled to welcome to the GSD these eight new ladder faculty, who each bring a remarkable depth of intellectual expertise and profound enthusiasm for collaboration within and across all nine of our programs, the entire university, and the world beyond.”

Meet the new faculty joining Harvard’s most creative school.

Maurice D. Cox

Cox, who joined the school as a professor of Urban Planning and Design, brings years of expertise in city planning and leadership.

The mayor of Charlottesville, Va., from 2002 to 2004, Cox comes to Cambridge fresh off two four-year stints as the director of planning and development for Detroit and Chicago.

In Chicago, Cox developed INVEST South/West to revitalize neighborhoods that had been historically disinvested, with 10 communities receiving funding to create new public amenities and affordable housing options.

He said his experience in city governance gives him a unique perspective in an academic setting.

“The academy is not asked to implement, and so I know that that’s something that only happens as a result of partnerships with those who are implementing, those who lead cities,” Cox said. “Bringing those components together always presents interesting challenges, but that’s what I've been doing throughout my entire career.”

Cox described himself as an “interpreter” and “translator of challenges that cities and people and political leadership positions face that often don’t present themselves as design challenges.”

“I look forward to helping the Graduate School of Design translate the brilliance of what we do through design in a context that sorely, sorely needs these designers,” he added.

Karen Lee Bar-Sinai

Formerly a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Technical University of Munich, Bar-Sinai joined the GSD as an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture. Her research looks into materials and emerging technologies in the context of landscape architecture and the environment.

“GSD has always spearheaded design,” Bar-Sinai said, adding that she is interested in partnering with researchers from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to study “visions for future construction, materials and methods.”

“That opens a whole range of possibility of what we can do,” she added.

Iman S. Fayyad

Fayyad, an assistant professor whose research and design interests lie in architectural geometry and representation, returns to the school where she previously served as a lecturer after a two-year stint at Syracuse University.

At the GSD, Fayyad will teach in the core program, the school’s first year design curriculum. She said she looks forward to interrogating the fundamental principles of an introductory design education.

“I’m really interested in redefining what that means, what a core education means, what education for the beginning design student means,” Fayyad said. “Those are questions we always ask and talk about at the GSD.”

Elisa Iturbe

Iturbe, another new appointment, joined in July as an assistant professor of Architecture. Iturbe focuses her work on the relation between energy, form, and power.

She is best known for introducing the idea of the carbon form — describing the unique urban and architectural structures of the carbon age — in a guest-edited issue of the architecture magazine Log.

Angela Pang

Pang, who previously served as a design critic at the GSD, is stepping up to a tenure-track position as an assistant professor of Architecture.

A Hong Kong-based architect, Pang has mostly worked on institutional planning projects such as university campuses and buildings. She also teaches and conducts research on how to make rational designs that “optimize making buildings with less” and are “responsible in the way we build.”

“We’re always trying to search for new ideas,” Pang said. “I feel I’m at the moment where I have enough knowledge, and I can start to try to think if there’s a way to reinvent things.”

Magda Maaoui

Maaoui is the second new GSD professor to secure a promotion from within, having previously served as a design critic at the school.

An expert on the housing production cycle and housing policy, Maaoui also served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, a research center jointly run by the GSD and the Harvard Kennedy School.

Maaoui will also bring a local expertise to the role, having previously written about housing policy in Cambridge.

“All these roles of being there for the students, being there for colleagues, and supporting the different missions that help structure the GSD as the great school that it is — that’s really also at the core of what I hope to be doing here,” Maaoui said.

Kaja J. Tally-Schumacher

Tally-Schumacher, an expert on designed landscapes and human-environment interactions in the ancient Mediterranean world, joined in July as an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture.

Tally-Schumacher currently co-directs an excavation of one of the largest urban gardens at Pompeii and said she looks forward to putting “Harvard and GSD students out into the field.”

“The GSD is just such an exciting place to be, with colleagues who are really at the forefront of doing very similar work, but in very different contexts and different periods too,” Tally-Schumacher said.

Rachel N. Weber

Weber — who studies the connections between finance, public policy, and the built environment — is joining in January 2025 as a professor of Urban Planning,

Weber said she is “excited for potential collaborations” at the school, adding that she looks forward to “being around all of these creative and imaginative folks who are also thinking about the future and thinking about the future of the built and natural environments.”

—Staff writer Catherine H. Feng can be reached at catherine.feng@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @catherinehfeng.