The Harvard Graduate School of Design is pleased to welcome Emmanuel Kofi Gavu as the Pollman Fellow in Real Estate and Urban Development for the 2022–2023 academic year.
Gavu (Dr.-Ing.) is a senior lecturer at the Department of Land Economy, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana. He completed his PhD in Spatial Planning at the TU Dortmund University in Germany. He also holds an MS in GIS for Urban Planning from the University of Twente in the Netherlands and a BS in Land Economy from KNUST Ghana.
Gavu is primarily interested in applications of GIS in urban management, real estate, and housing market analysis. He has published in the areas of hedonic modeling, housing market dynamics, and real estate education. A short-term consultant for the World Bank, Gavu is also a board member of the African Real Estate Society (AfRES), serves as chair of the Future Leaders of the African Real Estate Society (FLAfRES), and is a member of the Ghana Institution of Surveyors (GhIS). At the GSD, Gavu plans to work on the pricing of residential rental housing units in the Global South during global shocks, including pandemics. His goal is to provide information to housing market stakeholders that will enable them to understand the operations of the rental market during global shocks and to offer policy directives based on findings.
One of the fellowships and prizes administered by the GSD’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, the Pollman Fellowship was established in 2002 through a gift from Harold A. Pollman. It is given yearly to an outstanding postdoctoral graduate in real estate, urban planning, and development who spends one year in residence at the GSD as a visiting scholar.