RESEARCHERS

DR. JULIE LAWSON

Chief Writer and Content Coordinator for the #Housing2030 initiative

Julie is based in Europe as RMIT University’s Honorary Associate Professor for the Centre for Urban Research. She is an experienced international housing and urban researcher dedicated to policy reform through evidence based research and stakeholder consultation, who has led many large scale international projects on affordable and social housing for Australian and international organisations, universities and governments.

Dr Lawson recently completed an international Review of Land Policy for Affordable and Inclusive Housing with Professor Ruonavaara from Finland and provides expertise on the Review of National Regulation of Social and Community Housing for the Australian government. She led the path breaking AHURI Inquiry into Social Housing as Infrastructure, which influenced national reporting and investment debates and also drove research projects on financial intermediaries and guarantee schemes, that informed the establishment of the National Housing Finance Investment Corporation.

Julie is editor of the international journal Housing Theory and Society and the Housing Journal Podcast.

DR. MICHELLE NORRIS

Michelle Norris is Professor of Social Policy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her teaching and research interests focus on housing policy and urban regeneration, particularly on:

– the management and financing of social housing
– the regeneration of social housing estates and inner urban areas

She has led over 20 research projects on these issues and produced some 170 publications on the results. My latest book entitled Property, Family and the Irish Welfare State was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.

She has strong links with policy makers in Ireland. She is a member of the National Economic and Social Council which advises the Irish government on economic, environmental and social policy. In 2012 and again in 2017 she was appointed by the Minister for Housing as chair of the Housing Finance Agency which finances social housing in Ireland. In 2018 she was appointed by the Minister for Housing to the interim board of the Land Development Agency. It has been recently established to coordinate land within State control for more optimal uses, with a focus on the provision of new homes and addressing housing affordability challenges.

DR. KAT GRIMSLEY

Dr. Kat Grimsley is the Director of the Masters in Real Estate Development program at George Mason University. She is responsible for all aspects of the program including community building; alumni relations; faculty, staff, student, and curriculum management; and strategic development. Dr. Grimsley’s appointment as Director builds on of her unique blend of professional and academic experience with commercial real estate. She began her career in the private sector doing market research, financial modelling, and transactional work with commercial real estate in the Washington, DC area. She transitioned to a global focus when she accepted a role managing an international property development portfolio for the US Department of State, in which she developed acquisition strategies for diplomatic properties in more than 25 countries and represented the U.S. Government in the implementation of each. Specifically, Dr. Grimsley led multidisciplinary technical teams; conducted political, transactional and contract negotiations; and engaged in constant inter- and intra-agency coordination and consensus building.

Dr. Grimsley currently serves an advisory board member and Vice-Chair of the United Nation’s Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Real Estate Markets Advisory Group under the Committee of Urban Development, Housing, and Land Management. In 2018, she became the first woman to be appointed as a Distinguished Fellow of the NAIOP Research Foundation, the research branch of the NAIOP commercial real estate industry organization.

Dr. Grimsley completed her doctorate at the University of Cambridge, where her research addressed global tenure and title insecurity by uniting policy with existing international best practices and technological capacity in the context of global administrative solutions. Her on-going research is related to this theme and its connections to affordable housing policy. She also holds an MS in Real Estate from the Johns Hopkins University and a BS (hons) in Finance from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.(UNECE) Committee on Urban Development, Housing, and Land Management.

DR. SERGIO NASARRE-AZNAR

Sergio Nasarre-Aznar (Tarragona, 1974) is Full Professor of Civil Law and Director of the UNESCO Housing Chair at the University Rovira i Virgili (Spain). He is European Doctor in Law and holds an M.Phil. in Land Economy of the University of Cambridge.

Since 2008 he is a Corresponding Member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Jurisprudence and Legislation. He holds the ICREA Fellowship to the excellence of research 2016-2020. he is also a consultant of the EU Commission, the Catalan Parliament and Government, Amnesty International, FAO and the Association of German Pfandbrief Banks.

Since 2018, advisor to the German Ministry of the Interior, Construction and Community for the implementation of housing policies in Europe in its European Presidency in 2020. He has been Deputy Judge in the Court of Appeal of Tarragona for 15 years (2004-2018). He is the author of five books about housing, the mortgage market and the law of torts; the most recent is “Los años de la crisis de la vivienda” (Tirant lo Blanch, 2020). He has edited nine books more and has published 95 research papers and book chapters.

He has delivered over 190 invited speeches in 15 countries. He has taken part in drafting five laws related to housing. He has been main researcher or taken part in more than 40 national and international research projects, among which some with the EU Commission and the European Parliament about tenancies, evictions and homelessness, cross-border acquisition of land, mortgage consumers and collaborative economy.

DR. NÚRIA LAMBEA LLOP

Núria Lambea Llop is an international Doctor in Laws. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the UNESCO Housing Chair of the University Rovira i Virgili (URV). Her doctoral thesis was on models of social housing management in a comparative perspective, and it was funded by the Catalan Government (Grant FI 2016). She has a Law Degree (2013) and a MSc in Business and Contractual Law (2014, A with honours), both by the URV.

Dr. Lambea has been the main researcher in a project on the management of social housing in Catalonia (2014-2015, granted by EAPC) and member of the Reseach Group of three competitive projects on intermediate tenures in Catalonia (CEJFE 2014-2015), on housing tenures amendments (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad 2015-2017) and on the principles guiding a new Urban Leases Act (CEJFE 2016-2017). She is currently a member of the Reseach Group of a project on collaborative housing (Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad 2018-2020). On the frame of her research, she has published several peer-reviewed articles and has participated in conferences and workshops both at an international and national level (Görlitz, Lisbon, Perpignan, Belfast, Zurich, Uppsala, Barcelona, Bilbao, León, Vilanova i la Geltrú, Tarragona, Reus, among others). She has undertaken three research stays at the TU Delft (the Netherlands, 2014), University of Birmingham (United Kingdom, 2017) and at the NUI Galway (Ireland, 2018).

Her main research fields are housing policies, social housing, intermediate tenures and tourist dwellings. She is currently lecturing at the Advanced course for Real Estate Agents and Managing of Real Estate (URV Foundation), at the Master’s Degree in Business and Contractual Law, at the Degree of Law and at the Double degrees of Business Administration and Management and Law and Law and Labour Relations and Employment, all at the URV.

DR. HOLGER WALLBAUM

Holger is Full Professor of Sustainable building at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. He is an internationally renowned expert in the field of various kinds of sustainability assessments of buildings, road infrastructures, districts and cities. He is a frequent member of evaluation committees of several EU member states research councils of and the Research and Innovation programme of the EU.

Professor Wallbaum is a successful researcher with strong links to the construction industry and public authorities. His leadership in research and very active societal engagement in sustainability activities has been acknowledged in 2017 when he was elected as member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.

In 2017, he was awarded to host the World Sustainable Built Environment conference 2020. Between 2015 and 2019, Holger coordinated the EU Horizon 2020 funded project “DREEAM – Demonstrating an integrated Renovation approach for Energy Efficiency At the Multi-building scale” that successfully demonstrated combined carbon strategies for the existing building stock in social and public housing in the UK, Italy and Germany with a innovative approaches on tenant engagement.