Inaugural lecture: Professor Robin Lovelace

We are delighted to announce that Professor Robin Lovelace from The Institute for Transport Studies will be giving his Inaugural Lecture at The University of Leeds.

We would like to welcome everyone – colleagues, postgraduate researchers, students, alumni, and visitors – to this lecture celebrating the achievements and research contributions of Professor Lovelace.

In this inaugural lecture, we will hear from Professor Robin Lovelace, a leading expert in transport data science, as he discusses his work developing the evidence needed for more effective and future-proof transport planning.

About the lecture

The lecture will explore the role of data science in transport planning, highlighting key methodological, empirical and applied contributions made by Robin and his colleagues at the University of Leeds and beyond.

He will share insights from his journey as a researcher and practitioner, ranging from his PhD on the energy costs of commuting to recent work with multi-disciplinary teams to develop web applications for national government agencies.

Robin will cover key milestones in his career, including:

• How he became the lead developer of the national Propensity to Cycle Tool
• A secondment to the data science team in Number 10 Downing Street
• His role was building data and digital capacity with the UK Government agency Active Travel England, including instigating the Active Travel Infrastructure Design Portal, while balancing his time between the University of Leeds and the Civil Service (and a growing family)
• Current projects in 2025: research into integrated active/public transport scenarios and ‘bike buses’ in Portugal, and developing the ongoing Network Planning Tool for Scotland, with live demonstrations of new features.

Robin’s approach emphasises reproducible, open and therefore verifiable and scientific research techniques.

He has a strong interest in open source software development and international community-building to maximize impact, leading him to publish several popular R packages and to co-author books, including Geocomputation with R and Python.

Aligning with this hands-on approach to accessible data science and his ‘learning by doing’ teaching philosophy, the inaugural lecture will be preceded by a ‘Hackathon’ event earlier in the day in the ITS room 1.11.

Agenda

16:00 – 16:25 – Drinks reception in the ITS social space
16:30 – 17:30 – Lecture at Esther Simpson building, room 1.01
17:00 – 18:00 – Back to ITS for refreshment.

How to attend

Please register to attend at Ticket Source.

If you have any queries about this lecture, please email Liam Naar.