Dr. Paul Romer
Director, NYU Urban Expansion Program Headquarters

promer@stern.nyu.edu

Paul Romer, an economist and policy entrepreneur, is University Professor at NYU and founding director of the NYU Stern Urbanization Project, where he also leads the Charter Cities initiative. He is also the director of NYU’s Marron Institute of Urban Management. Whereas the Urbanization Project focuses on rapidly urbanizing countries, the Marron Institute conducts research on the challenges faced by cities in all countries.

Before coming to NYU, Romer taught at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. While there he took an entrepreneurial detour to start Aplia, an education technology company dedicated to increasing student effort and classroom engagement. Prior to Stanford, Romer taught in the economics departments at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. In 2002, he received the Recktenwald Prize for his work on the role of ideas in sustaining economic growth.

Romer earned a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago after doing graduate work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Queens University.

Dr. Shlomo Angel
Lead, NYU Urban Expansion Program Headquarters

sangel@stern.nyu.edu

Shlomo (Solly) Angel is an adjunct professor at NYU and senior research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project, where he leads the Urban Expansion initiative. Angel is an expert on urban development policy, having advised the United Nations, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). He currently focuses on documenting and planning for urban expansion in the developing world.

In 1973, he started a program in Human Settlements Planning and Development at the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok. He taught at the Institute from 1973 to 1983, while researching housing and urban development in the cities of East, South, and Southeast Asia. From the mid-80s to mid-90s, he worked as a housing and urban development consultant to UN-Habitat, the Asian Development Bank, and the Government of Thailand. In 2000, he published Housing Policy Matters, a comparative study of housing conditions and policies around the world. From 2000 onward, he prepared housing sector assessments of 11 Latin America and Caribbean countries for the IDB and the World Bank.

Angel earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture and a doctorate in city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Brandon Fuller
Deputy Director and Research Scholar, NYU Urban Expansion Program Headquarters

bfuller@stern.nyu.edu

Brandon Fuller is deputy director and research scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project. He is also deputy director of New York University’s Marron Institute. The Marron Institute deepens the fundamental understanding of cities by working with civic innovators to improve urban management. Prior to joining NYU, Fuller was director of Charter Cities, a non-profit focused on the potential for new cities to drive reform in rapidly urbanizing countries. He previously worked for an education technology startup, Aplia, that offered online experiments and problem sets aimed at increasing student effort and engagement in the college classroom. Fuller was also an adjunct professor of economics at the University of Montana after earning his master’s degree there in 2003.

Patrick Lamson-Hall
Research Scholar, NYU Urban Expansion Program Headquarters

plamsonh@stern.nyu.edu

Patrick Lamson-Hall is a Research Scholar at the NYU Stern Urbanization Project. He completed a Masters degree in Urban Planning at the NYU Wagner School of Public Service in 2013. He graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s degree from Portland State University in 2011. He is the Monitoring Coordinator of the Ethiopia Urban Expansion Initiative, and the NYU Representative at the India Urban Expansion Observatory. His research interests include urbanization in the developing world, development economics, and historical urbanization. He recently completed a research project with Dr. Solly Angel analyzing the historical population densities of the island of Manhattan. He also teaches short classes at the Brooklyn Brainery and the Society for the Advancement of Social Studies. Patrick was born in Oregon and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. In his free time, he enjoys bicycling, camping, and writing.