Professor João Porto de Albuquerque is Director of UBDC having joined the Urban Big Data Centre in October 2021 as Deputy Director. He is also a Professor in Urban Analytics at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

João is a geographer and computer scientist with an interdisciplinary background. His research adopts a transdisciplinary approach to participatory urban analytics, intersecting digital geographies, geographic information science, urban data science, information management and development studies. His approach is underpinned by the investigation of new methods that bridge critical and geo-computational perspectives to include a plurality of voices in the generation, circulation, and usage of data, with the goal of enabling transformations to urban sustainability and climate resilience. His transdisciplinary research on socio-ecological-technical urban systems not only emphasises cross-border collaboration between the (environmental) sciences, social sciences, and humanities; it also goes beyond academic disciplines to engage in co-production and participatory research with non-academic societal/indigenous stakeholders.

João has been leading a research programme centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data and participatory urban analytics to improve resilience to health and environmental risks. He has secured competitive research funds for his research in excess of £3.8m as PI (£13m as Co-I) from diverse national and international funding bodies (e.g. Global Challenges Research Fund, Leverhulme Trust, ESRC, EPSRC, Belmont Forum, NIHR, EU H2020, FAPESP, CAPES) in collaboration with academic and non-academic partners in several countries, including Australia, Brazil, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ghana, Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, Poland, Romania, Sweden, and the United States. Before coming to Glasgow, Prof Porto de Albuquerque worked at the University of Warwick as Co-Director of the Warwick institute for the Science of Cities, and Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, which he has established as a transdisciplinary cross-faculty hub. He has also set up the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarships Programme “TRANSFORM: Transformations of Human-Environment Interactions to Sustainable Development” aimed at training the next generation of sustainability scientists in collaboration with colleagues from different disciplines including computer science, ecology, urban geography, media studies and environmental humanities.

Publication links

• Google Scholar
• ResearchGate

• Professor in Urban Analytics, School of Social and Political Sciences