City+2025@Oxford: Urban Data Analytics and the Polycrisis – Draft Conference Speakers
City+2025@Oxford: The 8th International Conference on Interdisciplinary Urban Studies
Urban Data Analytics and the Polycrisis
September 29th & 30th 2025
School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, the UK
Draft Conference Speakers
Opening Panel Discussion – Data Analytics for Interdisciplinary Studies
Melinda Mills
University of Oxford
Melinda Mills Nuffield Professor of Demography, Director of Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, and Fellow of the British Academy. Her research spans diverse interdisciplinary topics – including biodemography, empirical sociology, statistics, public health and molecular genetics – with a focus on the causes and consequences of demographic change and health, and how these trends intersect with social inequalities.
Tim Schwanen
University of Oxford
Professor of Transport Geography, Director of Transport Studies Unit at School of Geography and the Environment, Fellow of the Academy for Social Sciences. Tim’s research concentrates on the geographies of the everyday mobilities of people, goods and information. It is international in outlook, interdisciplinary in scope, and informed by the thinking in various sub-disciplines within Geography.
Plenary Keynote Speech (in the order of appearance)
Danny Dorling
University of Oxford
‘1971 Professorship of Geography’, Fellow of Royal Society of Arts, Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, Fellow of Royal Statistical Society and Fellow of Royal Geographical Society. He has authored a substantial number of papers and books on issues of social inequalities, housing, health, employment, education, and poverty.
Benjamin Büttner
Technical University of Munich
Deputy chair of Urban Structure and Transport Planning and head of the Research Group on Accessibility Planning. He currently works in the fields of accessibility planning and decision and policy making.
Zhifu Mi
University College London
Professor of Climate Change Economics. He researches the economics of climate change, aiming to identify the most cost-effective and equitable steps to take to mitigate climate change. He has published extensively in leading journals such as Lancet and Nature sustainability.
Thanasis Kizos
University of the Aegean
Professor in rural Geography and head of the Department of Geography. He has published in agricultural landscape change, land use planning, agroforestry, sustainable agriculture, biodiversity impacts of agricultural systems among other topics.
Parallel workshop sessions
Workshop 1 – Introduction to Spatial Econometrics
Dasom Hong
University of Oxford
Doctoral candidate in financial geography. Her current research interests include international housing cycles, residential capitalism and inequality, and alternative housing finance movements.
Min Ruan
University of Oxford
Doctoral candidate in climate economics and finance. Her current interests include carbon offset markets and climate mitigation, sustainable finance and corporate net zero transition.
Workshop 2 – RobustiPy to make empirical research more robust
Charles Rahal
University of Oxford
Associate Professor in Data Science and Informatics. Charles is particularly interested in 1) methodology; specifically model uncertainty, responsible research, machine and deep learning related to health and social science; 2) applied Data Science; ‘unstructured data’ found ‘in the wild’; and 3) scientometrics; data analysis of the scientific record at scale.
Daniel Valdenegro
University of Oxford
Senior Data Scientist and Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science. His research in the Centre is focused on the development of robust estimation methods for social science and in the development of software libraries in Python and R to perform multiverse-type estimations.
Workshop 3 – Navigating inequalities with Mapineq
Douglas Leasure
University of Oxford
Senior Researcher and Data Scientist. He specialises in developing novel methods to map population sizes and demographics with high spatial resolution in data-sparse settings by supplementing traditional survey data with innovative new data sources including social media activity and space-based Earth observations.
Xiang Ao
University of Oxford
Doctoral candidate in economic geography and transport geography. His research interests include regional spatial structures, economic resilience, and industrial development.
Organising institutes:
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