Photo by Austin Sherman / Daniels 

Daniels is pleased to announce the appointment of Associate Professor, Fadi Masoud to the role of program director, Master of Landscape Architecture(MLA), effective July 1, 2026.

Masoud succeeds Elise Shelley, who served as MLA program director since 2022.

“My primary goal is to support our students in becoming thoughtful, creative, and confident leaders,” says Masoud. “Whether they pursue careers in private practice, government, community organizations, academia, or emerging fields that do not yet exist, I want our graduates to feel empowered to make meaningful contributions to society and their environment."

Masoud says he looks forward to strengthening the ties between landscape architecture, urban design and forestry programs at Daniels and will continue to strengthen the program’s international profile while expanding opportunities to engage with alumni, practitioners, researchers, communities and projects beyond the university; ensuring the curriculum continues to evolve alongside the challenges and opportunities shaping the profession.

“Our students benefit from an internationally recognized program embedded in an interdisciplinary faculty, working alongside globally renowned colleagues in architecture, urban design, visual studies, and forestry,” says Masoud. “Drawing on the expertise of our faculty and the city itself as a living laboratory, MLA students engage directly with the critical urban challenges shaping the 21st century. They learn to work across scales—from ecological systems and regional landscapes to neighbourhoods, streets, parks, and public realms—developing the knowledge and skills needed to address a wide range of issues.”

Masoud’s design and research work engages the landscape as an operational force in shaping the built environment; examining how environmental systems, policy, sociocultural considerations and design interact to support urban design, and in particular urban climate adaptation and resilience. Masoud has a strong record of coordinating studio pedagogy and contributes widely to international conferences, publications, competitions and exhibitions that reflect an imaginative commitment to addressing the climate emergency.

“I often say that I see landscape as a lens and a frame to understand and shape the world around us. When you lead with landscape, you inherently bring the physical, social, environmental and experiential realms into focus. You are working with time, with people, with living matter, with land and water, and with systems; and this gives you a lot of agency to transform the world.”

Prior to his appointment at the University of Toronto, Masoud held teaching and research positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). More recently he has held visiting appointments at the University of Miami and KU Leuven in Belgium.

“Toronto and U of T have long been at the forefront of landscape architectural thinking, planning and practice,” says Masoud.

The program’s intellectual and professional legacy is both rich and influential, beginning with Michael Hough, who founded the program and became one of Canada’s most prominent landscape architects. Hough’s work helped shape and protect Toronto’s ravine system and established a lasting foundation for ecological planning and design. Masoud adds that it is also at Daniels that ideas linking landscape and infrastructure gain prominence, and where theories of landscape urbanism—ideas that profoundly influence contemporary urban design worldwide—find clear expression in many of the transformative projects along Toronto’s waterfront.

“Today, that legacy continues both within Daniels and across the city,” adds Masoud. “Our faculty lead internationally recognized research on landscape literacy, cultural landscapes and Indigenous reconciliation, computation and visualization, green technology and bio-innovation, climate adaptation, landscape planning and public realm design. At the same time, Toronto has emerged as a global laboratory for landscape-led urban transformation, where many of the world’s leading landscape architecture practices have helped reimagine post-industrial lands—particularly along the waterfront.” 

Maoud is currently the director of the Centre for Landscape Research (CLR). Since becoming director in 2020, he has emphasized interdisciplinary design, education and research that advance climate resilience through novel urban codes, geospatial decision-making tools and the design of parks as a form of climate action. He is also working with various partners to develop national actions aimed at addressing and challenging existing definitions of quality in the built environment.  

“This is an extraordinary moment for landscape architecture. Across Canada and around the world, we are confronting interconnected challenges—from climate change and biodiversity loss to housing affordability, and from public health, to social equity, and responding to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action,” he says. “Increasingly, people are recognizing that many of these challenges are fundamentally interconnected and that landscape thinking can play a critical role in addressing them.”

“What excites me most is the opportunity to work with students who are eager to take on these challenges and who see landscape architecture as a discipline capable of shaping more optimistic and inspiring futures,” he says.  

Through the CLR, Masoud has also expanded his collaboration with different public agencies, research institutions and governments across North America. He served on various competition and award juries, most recently an international design competition for the YZD Runway in Downsview and the 2025 City of Ottawa Urban Design Awards. Masoud has been a member of Waterfront Toronto’s Design Review Panel since 2018 and contributed to the City of Toronto’s first Resilience Strategy as part of the Urban Flooding Working Group.  

Masoud is the editor of Terra-Sorta-Firma: Reclaiming the Littoral Gradient (Actar, 2020), a book that delves into the risks and realities of constructing on reclaimed coastal land. He has authored several peer-reviewed journal articles that emphasize the enduring connections between landscape architecture and resilient design, as well as the potential of using landscape architecture to reshape land use zoning as a means of climate adaptation. He is the co-author of a forthcoming Parks in Action (Leuven University Press), a book that investigates the role parks will play in shaping Toronto’s future. Masoud has received numerous awards, including the Ontario Association of Landscape Architects (OALA) Research and Innovation Award, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) Teaching Excellence Award, the Fulbright Fellowship, the Heather M. Reisman Gold Medal in Design, the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Certificate of Honor, Harvard Graduate School of Design’s Jacob Weidenmann Prize. He was a National Olmsted Scholar Finalist and received the Charles E. Beveridge Fellowship from the Olmsted Friends of Fairsted.  

He holds a bachelor’s in environmental studies with a focus on urban design and urban development from the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, a Master of Landscape Architecture from U of T and a post-professional master’s in landscape architecture, with distinction, from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD).  

“If you want to study landscape architecture in a place where design excellence, research, critical inquiry, and real-world impact come together, Daniels offers an unparalleled environment. Here, landscape architecture is understood not as a specialized niche, but as a powerful and expansive discipline capable of shaping the world.” Masoud says.