About me
I am a highly networked, trilingual (English, Arabic & Spanish), leading practitioner, academic and expert in low carbon urbanisation, sustainability and resource productivity with a strong self-starting attitude and an international experience working across cultures. My focus is on leadership and delivery with skills in planning, organising, networking, motivating, negotiating, influencing and building strong relationships internationally working with the confines of fixed deadlines and clear timeframes.
I am a graduate of University College London, a British university consistently ranked as one of the top three multi-faculty universities in the UK. I am Associate Director for Europe and the Middle East with Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities programme. I led the University of Brighton Planning School since 2008 and currently serve as an elected member on the Policy Council of the Town and Country Planning Association and on the General Assembly of the Royal Town Planning Institute. I was re-elected onto the TCPA's Policy Council in June 2013 for a further period of three years. I was invited in 2012 into eminent Fellowship of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and in 2013 was invited to join the Academy of Urbanism as an Academician. The Academy is a high level, cross sector group of individuals that champions the cause of good quality urbanism throughout the UK and Ireland. It is an invitation only membership organisation whose members share and disseminate the principles, techniques and processes of good urbanism. I was admitted into Fellowship of the Royal Society of Arts in 2014.
I was seconded from February 2013 until July 2014 to the Higher Education Academy where I held the position of Discipline Lead for the Built Environment. In addition, I currently hold the position of Visiting Professor of Planning at the Institute of Urban Economy, Universidad Esan, in Lima, Peru.
I was awarded the Royal Town Planning Institute 2012 Planning Leaders Award for the UK's South East Region.
Latest news
Disruptive innovation in STEM education
Posted on March 4, 2014
Dr. Samer Bagaeen
In The Innovative University: Changing the DNA if Higher Education from the Inside Out, Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring promote the idea that there are two main types of innovation. The first type, sustaining innovation, makes something bigger and better. This includes airplanes that can travel faster, telephones that can browse the internet and hard drives that can store more at the same time as growing smaller. There is also a different kind of innovation with more profound impacts, a disruptive innovation. This type of innovation disrupts and breaks the bigger, better and more established cycle. The growth in online shopping, digital high streets and online learning are examples where this has kind of innovation has taken hold.