Our People
Executive Chair
Murtaza Haider
Murtaza Haider is a professor and the Radhe Krishna Gupta Executive Chair in Cities and Communities in the Alberta School of Business at the 51ÁÔÆæ.
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 will serve 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.
Previously, Haider has held positions as the associate dean of graduate programs in the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University and served as the research director of the Urban Analytics Institute. He has also served as associate dean of research and graduate programs, director of internationalization, interim director of the School of Health Services Management, and chair of the Department of Real Estate Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.
He began his academic career at McGill University as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Engineering, where he founded and directed the Urban Systems Lab, funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation.
Murtaza Haider holds a master's degree in transport engineering and a Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Toronto.
Affiliated Faculty Members
Urban Economics and Planning
Sandeep Agrawal
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.
Tianran Dai
Dai's research encompasses urban economics, labor economics, and development economics, with a particular interest in neighborhoods.
David Dale-Johnson
Professor David Dale-Johnson is the Stan Melton Executive Professor in Real Estate at the Alberta School of Business. 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. David is committed to using his expertise to build collaboration in the business of city building.
Jay Hyun
Hyun's area of specialization is International Economics and its broad intersections with Macroeconomics, Corporate Finance, and International Business. His research uses a combination of micro-level data and structural models to understand shock propagation mechanisms and network spillovers, with a particular emphasis on the role played by firms. He is also interested in understanding global supply chain formation and reorganization, multinational activities, and their interactions with various economic factors.
James Macek
Macek studies the economics of housing affordability and regulation. His current work assesses the costs and benefits of minimum lot size restrictions and the taxation of building teardowns. These works share a common theme: how housing regulations affect neighborhoods’ social composition and value.
Paul Messinger
Paul Messinger is the Department Chair of Marketing, Business Economics and Law at the 51ÁÔÆæ. His research focuses on emerging retail formats, self-presentation in the metaverse, service science, marketing of really new products and brand extensions, pricing, e-commerce, and recommendation systems.
Sidharth Moktan
Sidharth’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.
John Pracejus
Professor John Pracejus’ research focuses on consumers' emotional responses to marketing, visual communications and brand associations. He holds a Ph.D. in Marketing from the University of Florida and an M.A. in Communications from the University of Illinois. He has published work in numerous reputable journals and has presented research findings in over 20 countries. Additionally, he has taught at universities in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Hong Kong, Russia and the United States.
Sahil Raina
Sahil Raina is an associate professor of finance at the 51ÁÔÆæ’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 Schiff
Schiff's research spans urban economics, public economics, and industrial organization, with a focus on how geography affects the characteristics of markets and economic outcomes.
Barry Scholnick
Barry Scholnick is a Professor of Business Economics and the Eldon Foote Chair in International Business at the Alberta School of Business, 51ÁÔÆæ, Canada. His PhD is from the University of Cambridge. The focus of his research is on Household Finance.
Yanhao Wang
Yanhao works on topics in health economics, household finance, and industrial organization. His recent research examines how frictions in the real estate market affect household decision-making and professional labor market outcomes
Transportation, Engineering & Infrastructure
Karim El-Basyouny
Dr. Karim El-Basyouny holds an endowed chair position in urban traffic safety at the 51ÁÔÆæ. He is a licensed Professional Engineer in the province of Alberta and holds MASc and PhD degrees in Transportation Engineering from the University of British Columbia. Karim is passionate about all things safety and has and continues to dedicate his research and professional career to furthering our understanding of increasing safety and improving mobility for all road users. For the past decade, Karim’s research on speed and safety management has been informing public policy and practice. To him, safety is a product just like any other good or service, and through his research, he advocates for the creation of a management framework which produces a safe system. His goal is to agitate the discussion on important and often neglected issues to achieve a system that is free of death and disability. Karim is an active member of multiple (inter)national safety committees and serves on the editorial boards of several prominent journals.
Huiying "Fizzy" Fan
Fizzy is a Research Engineer II at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she obtained her Ph.D. in Transportation Engineering. Fizzy works at the intersection of transportation systems engineering, climate modeling, and network sciences. Her research delves into the complexities of spatiotemporal transportation resilience under climate change. It highlights network-level features of systems resilience, such as trip-level risk accumulation, cascading failures, and potential tipping points that lead to system-wide collapse. Beyond theoretical contributions, Fizzy also emphasizes the practical application of research through the development of simulation software tools like SidewalkSim and TransitSim.
Emily Grisé
Dr. Emily Grisé is an Assistant Professor in the School of Urban and Regional Planning at the 51ÁÔÆæ. 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.
Mustafa Gül
Dr. Mustafa Gül is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the 51ÁÔÆæ. 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.
Tae J. Kwon
Dr. Tae J. Kwon joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the 51ÁÔÆæ 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.
Matti Siemiatycki
Matti Siemiatycki is Director of the Infrastructure Institute and Professor of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. His work focuses on delivering large-scale infrastructure projects, evidence based infrastructure investment decisions, and the effective integration of infrastructure into the fabric of cities. His recent studies explore transit policy decisions, the value for money of public-private partnerships, the development of innovative mixed-use buildings as a form of place based infrastructure policy, and the diversity gap in the infrastructure industry workforce. Matti consults widely on infrastructure policy and is a frequent media commentator on infrastructure and city planning.
Stephen Wong
Dr. Stephen Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the 51ÁÔÆæ, joining in October 2021. Stephen’s research focuses on the intersection of evacuations, decision-making, and shared mobility and works to create more resilient, environmentally friendly, and equitable transportation systems. His dissertation research developed empirically driven and equitable evacuation and resilience strategies for governmental agencies to prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters. Stephen leads the Resilient and Sustainable Mobility and Evacuation (RESUME) Group.
STAFF
Will Alloway
Will Alloway is the growth coordinator for the Cities Institute. He graduated from the Alberta School of Business' Bachelor of Commerce program in 2017 and has worked in business banking, communications and as an analyst in law enforcement. After joining the U of A's Centre for Cities and Communities in 2023, he has worked to grow the centre into the Cities Institute. Outside of work, Will is a self-published fiction author who enjoys going on river valley hikes, kayaking and trying new food.