News and Updates

2025

Dec 1st: Stephen Chen (BSc Compsci) and Hayden Burns (BSc GISci) joins the team as summer interns! Stephen will learn complexity science and an agent-based modelling, and will later on replicate the Tillydrone model of Aberdeen. Hayden will be involved in the Participatory mapping in public waste bins, where he will do some academic reading but also on the Shiny dashboard development. Looking forward to this 10-week challenge, folks!
Nov 25th: ‘Environments for child health’ team (led by Prof Melody Smith) won The Auckland Medical Research Foundation at the amount of NZD 200,000 for the duration of 2026-2028, woohoo!
Nov 5th/19th: the [Congestion Pricing] project wraps up the 1st year job. Great success on the update, everyone!
Oct 17th: Secured NZD 40,000 for the project ‘Will congestion pricing affect your decision to drive? Commuter behaviour and equity under congestion pricing’ for the period 2026–27.
Oct 15th: Rose Martin joined the group as the Global City Review of the Congestion Pricing project until the end of the year!
Oct 1st: Richard Beauchamp joined the group as a research assistant working on geospatial analysis for the Congestion Pricing project until the end of the year!
Sep 1st: Secured an extra amount of funding from the TIF (Transdisciplinary Ideation Funding), totalling NZD 23,000
May 23rd: Got funding (NZD 2,000) from the Emerging Research Network (ERN) at the University of Auckland

Dec 12th: “Diagnosing Spatial and Temporal Biases of OSM Contributors: Identifying Differences Between Gender and Age from an Online Survey” is accepted to the Annals of the American Association of Geographers!
Dec 2nd: Working with two Summer Research Interns on 1) Creating a Walkability Index for Primary School Children in NZ, and 2) Creating a Web Dashboard that will run Public Transport status
Nov 11th: Appointed as a Early Career Editorial Board in Health and Place Journal for two years! URL
Sep 21st: Navigating the Challenges of Spatially and Temporally Poor Data in Agent-based Models: Exploring Air Pollution Generation and Population Movement” has been accepted for publication at SESMO.
August 6th: Did the Implementation of Low Emission Zone in Glasgow Change the Traffic Flow and Air Quality?’ to the journal Findings.
Apr 3rd: Started a new job as a lecturer in GIScience at the University of Auckland profile
Mar 31st: Informed a leave date for the MRC/CSO Social Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow
Feb 29th-Mar 1st: Exascale agent-based modelling workshop https://exascale.hutton.ac.uk/hpc-abm
Feb 7th: Published a pre-print on arXiv & submitted it to journal (awaiting review)

Oct 16th: Accepted an offer to become a lecturer in GIScience at the School of Environment, University of Auckland
Sep 12th-15th: Presented at the Disruptive Movement Analysis (DMA) workshop at the GIScience conference (Leeds UK). The talk was entitled Assessing the Accuracy of Pathfinding Algorithms for Scottish Children’s Home-to-School Commutes: A Comparison with GPS Trajectories
Sep 4th-8th: Presented at the Social Simulation Conference 2023 (Glasgow, UK) Glasgow Low Emission Zone: Simulating the Change in Traffic Flow and the Following Health Outcome