Khatun Zannat

Profile

I am currently working as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, on the OptiWaSP (Optimised Walking Schoolbus Planning) project, funded by the research council EPSRC. Prior to my current role, I worked as a Lecturer and was then promoted to Assistant Professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology, Bangladesh between 2013 and 2023.

I hold a bachelor’s degree in Urban and Regional Planning (BURP) from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Bangladesh. I furthered my education through a double degree master’s program in International Cooperation in Urban Development as an Erasmus Mundus Scholar, studying at both the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, and the University of Grenoble Alpes, France. I was awarded my PhD by the University of Leeds, with research funded by the Schlumberger Foundation-Faculty for the Future (FFF) Fellowship. My PhD research title is “Improving Transportation Planning Tools for the Global South: Applying Advanced Modelling Frameworks to Address Data Issues and Accommodate Behavioural Complexities.”

Research interests

My research centres on the intersection of individual decision-making and urban challenges, with a particular focus on transport planning. In my research I investigate how individual choices can serve as catalysts for emerging transport planning challenges such as congestion, car dependency, and urban pollution. I strive to understand individuals' travel and activity decisions using both conventional and emerging data sources, while also exploring the benefits of combining different data types to capture behavioural complexities. Much of my published work synthesises individual decision-making through behavioural models, offering insights into macroscopic problems and enabling informed policymaking. By employing this bottom-up research approach, I aim to bridge knowledge gaps in the urban planning process, specifically in understanding the root causes of transport challenges and developing individual-focused strategies to address them. Therefore, my research is inherently inter- and multidisciplinary, drawing extensively on broader research areas of behavioural and demand modelling, data science, and microsimulation. I have greater experience to work on emerging transport planning issues in the Global South, but I am not limiting my research focus and am open to exploring timely and emerging challenges in the Global North as well.

Grant and Award 

Smeed Prize Runner-Up (2023): Awarded by the Universities’ Transport Study Group (UTSG) conference for the research titled "Investigating the relative precision of GPS, GSM, and CDR data for inferring spatio-temporal travel trajectories," supervised by Prof. Charisma Choudhury and Prof. Stephane Hess, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds (https://utsg.net/news).

Social Science Research Council Training Fund by the Ministry of Planning of the Government of Bangladesh (2021-2022), Training title - “Quantitative research methods and data analysis with R programming language”

Directorate of Research and Extension (DRE) research grant by Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology (CUET) (2018-2019), Project title: “Children’s Independent Mobility: An approach towards sustainable urban Transport”

Awarded in DRIA International Design Competition, 2016 for Urban Design Excellence and the title of the project was “S.A.F.E. Waterscape” https://designingresilience.com/proposals/s-a-f-e-waterscape/

Qualifications

• PhD
• MSc
• BURP