We are pleased to welcome Professor Joao Porto de Albuquerque who will join us in October 2021 as Professor in Urban Analytics and Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC). Joao is a geographer and computer scientist with an interdisciplinary background. His research adopts a transdisciplinary approach to participatory urban analytics, intersecting digital geographies, geographic information science, urban data science, information management and development studies. His approach is underpinned by the investigation of new methods that bridge critical and geo-computational perspectives to include a plurality of voices in the generation, circulation, and usage of data, with the goal of enabling transformations to urban sustainability and climate resilience.

Joao has been leading a research programme centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data to improve resilience to health and environmental risks. He has secured competitive research funds for his research in excess of £3.8m as PI (£13m as Co-I) from diverse national and international funding bodies (e.g. Global Challenges Research Fund, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, EPSRC, Belmont Forum, NIHR, EU H2020, FAPESP, CAPES) in collaboration with academic and non-academic partners in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the United States. Before coming to Glasgow, he worked at the University of Warwick as Co-Director of the Warwick institute for the Science of Cities, and Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, which he has established as a transdisciplinary cross-faculty hub. He has also set up the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme 'TRANSFORM: Transformations of Human-Environment Interactions to Sustainable Development' aimed at training the next generation of sustainability scientists in collaboration with colleagues from different disciplines including computer science, ecology, urban geography, media studies and environmental humanities.

First published: 3 September 2021

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