Professor Nik Lomax

Profile

I am Professor of Population Geography in the School of Geography. My research estimates, projects and simulates populations at fine geographical scales, asking how population change shapes, and is shaped by, the places people live. I work with microsimulation, synthetic populations and smart data: commercially held sources such as loyalty card transactions, connected vehicles and wearable devices, which can measure the health and sustainability of places at a detail and timeliness that surveys and administrative data cannot match.

I am Director of the Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service (HASP), a £6.4m investment funded through the ESRC Smart Data Research UK programme. Launched in January 2025, the service negotiates access to commercially held smart data and makes it available to researchers through interactive tools, open derived datasets and safeguarded access for approved projects. I am also Co-Director of the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC), a national ESRC data infrastructure investment, where I have held leadership roles since 2018.

Beyond the university, I advise government on migration and population statistics. I am a member of the Home Office Science Advisory Council, recruited in 2025 as a migration expert to advise the Chief Scientific Adviser; I have served since 2018 on the ONS Methodological Assurance Review Panel, which reports to the National Statistician and assured the methodology behind the 2021 Census as well as ongoing innovations in population statistics; and I sit on the ONS expert advisory group for the National Population Projections. From 2018 to 2024 I was a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

I chair the Applied Geography Commission of the International Geographical Union, a network of 170 members in 27 countries, and I serve on the editorial boards of Population, Space and Place, Geographical Analysis and the International Journal of Microsimulation.

Responsibilities

• Director of the Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service

Research interests

My research spans spatial demography and population geography. I have a long standing interest in population change: subnational population estimation and projection, internal and international migration, and the processes driving local growth and decline. I also utilise smart data to understand health and place: using consumer and commercial data to understand how the health and sustainability of places intersect. Core methods I employ include microsimulation and synthetic population generation.

Current projects include:

• The Healthy and Sustainable Places Data Service (ESRC Smart Data Research UK, 2025–2029), as Principal Investigator and Director
• The HealthMod Cluster: policy modelling to tackle the economic determinants of health and health inequality (UKRI, 2024–2028), as co-lead on the synthetic population workstrand
• The National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre (BBSRC, 2024–2029), as co-investigator within the People pillar
• FuturePop: population projections, centralisation and planning for an uncertain future (Research Council of Norway, 2025–2028, with Statistics Norway and the University of Oslo), as Leeds lead

Co-investigator (Co-I)

• Evaluation, Revision and Extension of Ethnic Population Projections - NewETHPOP
• Helping governments and businesses understand the ethnic transition and use information on future ethnic populations
• NAPIC: National Alternative Protein Innovation Centre

Qualifications

• PhD Human Geography
• MA Planning and Development
• BA Human Geography

Research groups and institutes

• Institute for Spatial Data Science

Current postgraduate researchers

• Kejian LI
• Leon Noble
• Davi Gressler
• Frank Chen
• Bhagya Chintakula