Niall G. Kirkwood is Professor of Landscape Architecture and Technology at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1992. In July 2003, he assumed the Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, the oldest such program in North America, founded in 1901 by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and Arthur Shurcliff. In 2005 he became Director of the Master in Landscape Architecture Degree Programs (MLA). From 1999 to 2003, he was the coordinator of the "Design and Environment" track of the Master in Design Studies Program (MDesS), the mid-career degree program at the GSD.

He teaches in design studio and offers courses on the subject of Technology in Landscape Architecture. Seminars include, Landfill Enduse: Fresh Kills, Staten Island, NY, Land Reclamation and Remediation Technologies, Brownfields Practicum: Sustainable Redevelopment of Brownfield Sites in Dorchester and East Boston, MA, and Brownfields Practicum: Sustainable Redevelopment of Brownfield Sites in Somerville, Massachusetts. Lecture courses include: Landscape Technology and Rebuilding Devastated Landscapes: Sustainable Landscape Development in the 21st Century. Design studios include: Maximum Mumbai, Minimum Mumbai: Repositioning the Cotton Textile Mill Lands, Girangaon, Central Mumbai, India; Altered Faces: Reworking the Teheran Corridor, Seoul, Korea; Motor City Landscapes: Detroit Riverfront; and the third semester core studio Planning and Design of Landscapes.

Kirkwood's teaching, research, and publishing broadly concerns technology and its relationship to design in the built environment. He currently carries out academic research into landscape detail technologies, the durability of built landscapes, and the reuse of former industrial or disturbed land. Areas of specific focus include urban brownfields, municipal landfills, the regeneration of Superfund sites, decommissioned military bases, and closed nuclear research facilities. He is the founder and current director of the Center for Environment and Technology (CTE), a research, advisory, and executive education initiative at GSD. The Center focuses on site analysis, remediation, and sustainable reclamation issues in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Prior to joining the Harvard faculty Kirkwood worked fifteen years in private practice in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and London, England as a registered landscape architect and architect carrying out urban land reclamation, landscape architectural design, urban architecture, and development projects in Europe, the Middle East, and the U.S.A.

The general scope of Kirkwood's teaching, research, and publishing all emphasize a broader understanding of current and emerging technologies and techniques from landscape, civil and environmental engineering, and how this understanding can best result in more creative and progressive design work in landscape architecture.

His book The Art of Landscape Detail examines the materials, structure, and language of detail as a means of not only understanding contemporary landscape design work, but as a source of future ideas and creative expression in landscape architecture. A new publication Weathering and Durability in Landscape Architecture continues this research by examining the topics of materiality, time, and change in the constructed landscape.

His recent research concerns the reclamation of land and the integration of innovative technologies and design strategies in their redevelopment and regeneration. Manufactured Sites: Rethinking the Post-Industrial Landscape and the forthcoming Reclaimed: Recovery Processes and Design Practices for Post-Industrial Landscapes co-edited with Professor Robert France, both concern contaminated sites, including derelict abandoned land from former urban and industrial uses.