Advisory Board

Thomas Murphy, former 3-term mayor of Pittsburgh where he managed to secure the one billion dollars in funding to develop a strategic partnership to transform more than 1,000 acres of blighted, abandoned industrial properties into new commercial, residential, retail, and public uses. He has extensive experience in urban revitalization. Murphy served eight terms in the Pennsylvania State General Assembly House of Representatives, as well as working in the Peace Corps in Paraguay. Thomas Murphy graduated from the New Mayors Program offered by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. He holds a Master of Science degree in urban studies from Hunter College, and a Bachelor of Science degree in biology and chemistry from John Carroll University

Prof. Yasser Elsheshtawy is an independent scholar, an Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, GSAPP and Non-Resident Fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, DC. He was a Professor of Architecture at United Arab Emirates University, Al Ain, where in addition to teaching he also ran the Urban Research Lab. Considered an authority on urbanism in the region, his scholarship focuses on urbanization in developing societies, informal urbanism, urban history and environment-behavior studies, with a particular focus on Middle Eastern cities. He also authored a series of books and publications and has one of the notable city blogs in the world.

Prof. Robert Cervero is a professor emeritus of city & regional planning at the University of California. He works in the area of sustainable transportation policy and planning, focusing on the nexus between urban transportation and land-use systems. He was a member of Berkeley's city and regional planning faculty from 1980 to 2016, where he twice served as Department Chair, directed both the University of California Transportation Center and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. He holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of California, a M.C.P. and M.S. in Civil Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in Geography and Economics from the University of North Carolina.