Postgraduate Housing Design Fellowship for GSD Students

The Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies is offering a year-long Housing Design Fellowship for students who will be graduating from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD) in spring 2025 or who graduated from GSD in 2024. 

The Housing Design Fellow will serve as the project manager for The State of Housing Design (SOHD), a book that will review national trends, ideas, and critical issues as they relate to residential design and will identify notable, recently built housing projects whose design addresses such issues as affordability, social cohesion, sustainability, aesthetics, density, and urbanism. (The first of these books was published in November 2023; the second will be published in November 2026.)  

This will be a year-long, full-time (35 hours/week), benefits-eligible position with an annual salary of $70,000. The fellow will begin working after graduation (but no later than July 1, 2025). If both parties agree, the position can be extended until late 2026 or early 2027.

Responsibilities 

Working under the Center’s Managing Director and the book’s editors (Dan D’Oca and Sam Naylor), the Housing Design Fellow will serve as the project manager for the research, writing, editing, and production of the SOHD. The fellow will play a central role in developing research and survey strategies for identifying notable projects and key themes and ideas about those projects and will then oversee the student research assistants who will carry out this research. In addition to managing internal deadlines and team members, they will work with the editors to secure additional contributors for the book and serve as the primary liaison with those writers. They also will oversee the preparation of graphic materials for the publication, ensure that the publication and related online materials meet accessibility guidelines, and help coordinate production of the book and a major book release event. 

The fellow will also have the opportunity to contribute to other research projects at the Center related to housing design, with specific topics determined in consultation with the Managing Director. These might include such topics as the potential of off-site construction to reduce the cost of housing production, the potential of changes to zoning or building codes to expand the housing supply, or how design might contribute to addressing the challenges of climate change or an aging society.  

Qualifications 

This fellowship is only open to individuals graduating from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in May 2025 as well as those who graduated in May 2024 or finished their coursework in December 2024.  

Applicants should have knowledge of the ways that housing design can address key housing-related challenges and the ways that the development process and public policies influence housing design. They also should be able to write clearly about design and the built environment, to create graphics that effectively communicate key concepts and ideas, and to manage complex projects. 

Compensation 

This will be a year-long, full-time (35 hours/week), benefits-eligible position with an annual salary of $70,000. The fellow will begin working after graduation (but no later than July 1, 2025). If both parties agree, the position can be extended until late 2026 or early 2027.

Location 

While we prefer candidates who can work at least some of the time (most likely 1-2 days per week) in our offices in Cambridge, we will consider applicants who primarily would be working remotely with the understanding that such candidates will arrange to be in Cambridge approximately once a month. 

More Information

Contact David Luberoff, the Center’s Director of Fellowships and Events, with any questions.