Transport – a demanding transition: inaugural lecture by Professor Kate Pangbourne

Professor Kate Pangbourne, the new Chair of Transport Transitions at the Institute for Transport Studies, will give her 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 achievement and research contributions of Professor Pangbourne. 

In this inaugural lecture, Kate Pangbourne, the new Chair of Transport Transitions at the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS), will set out an interdisciplinary research agenda for addressing the decarbonisation, social justice and environmental challenges in transport.  

Hear about the career transitions that have led her to this role, forged from the usual vicissitudes of life, a highly interdisciplinary set of work experiences, and a profound concern for people and the planet which is our only home.

She will weave this into an exploration of the demanding nature of the urgent need to transition from our current transport system and way of life, away from hypermobilities, unsustainable resource consumption and the biodiversity catastrophe. Environmental concerns beginning before the ground-breaking Rio Conference of 1992 lie at the heart of Kate’s varied work.

Over the past 15 years, Kate has

• researched detailed case studies of the changing structures of transport governance in Scotland
• carried out comparative work on the evolving socio-technical imaginaries of European countries positioning themselves as leaders in the pursuit of self-driving vehicles
• used experiments to understand the persuasive nature (or not) of voluntary travel behaviour change messaging aimed at individuals
• surveyed the public response to travel applications such as mobility as a service
• critiqued the implications of smart mobility and identified challenges for steering outcomes for a safer future.

As the Governance theme lead for the Energy Demand Research Centre (EDRC), Kate leads work on the agency, governance positioning and social, environmental and economic co-benefits derived from the varied activities of community action groups.

She studies the governance challenges of the intermeshing of place-based energy and transport-related decisions and interventions.

This diverse perspective, in part derived from her origin story in arts and humanities, is sure to deliver a compelling and inspiring evening. 

Biography

Professor Pangbourne is an interdisciplinary researcher with an academic background spanning social and environmental sciences, humanities and computer science.

She is the Governance Theme Lead for the multi-institution Energy Demand Research Centre, a co-investigator in the large-scale UK investment TransiT hub Twinning for Decarbonising Transport, co-lead of the ITS Social and Political Sciences Research Group and a Deputy Director of the Leeds Social Sciences Institute.

Her work on transport governance and smart mobility investigates the power relations, structures, scales and processes involved in the strategic vision and implementation of transport policies, drawing on notions of state (spatial) projects, multi-level governance, socio-technical transitions and collaborative advantage.  

Her work on behaviour change engages with behavioural science, persuasion and mobile technologies.

Prior to returning to academia in 2003, Kate spent around a decade working for Scottish Natural Heritage (now known as Nature Scot), the governance body for the conservation of nature in Scotland.

As a post-doctorate researcher at the University of Aberdeen, she worked on a variety of projects funded by different sources, including CAP-IRE (EU FP7), PolicyGrid II (ESRC/Digital Social Research), and MyWay (EU FP7), thematically linked through work investigating behaviours of different types and their social, distributional and economic impacts.  

Kate joined the Institute for Transport Studies in 2016 with a prestigious five-year EPSRC-funded Living with Environmental Change personal fellowship.

She is a former Chair of the Transport Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG), former Executive Committee member of the Universities Transport Studies Group and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport Geography.

In 2024, she was promoted to Professor and celebrates with this inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds. 

Register

Register for a free ticket at Ticket Source. If you have any queries about this lecture please email Stephanie Siviter.