Maynooth University Faculty of Social Sciences

As an urban geographer and spatial data scientist, my research is focused broadly on better understanding how urban spatial structure and transportation systems influence economic, environmental, and social outcomes in order to help solve the complex ongoing crises facing our interconnected global society in the 21st century: economic inequality, climate change, widespread health disparities, and other forms of social, racial, and environmental injustice. Cities are complex systems, and their spatial organization has a direct impact on basically every feature of human life: how our economy functions, how new ideas are generated, how people have access to jobs, how they interact with their friends and strangers, how they get exercise, how they get their food, how they vote, and how much they pollute - and the decisions that city governments make (or don’t make) thus have far-reaching impacts on people’s health, economic behavior, and relative social advantage or disadvantage.

 I study these topics mostly using quantitative, data-driven approaches because I believe that “data is power,” and although all policy decisions inherently occur in a political framework (and structural political change is certainly a prerequisite for solving these complex problems), quantitative data and statistical analysis - when properly applied and understood - can provide powerful evidence in favor of particular policies that can foster beneficial change in the world. To make change, we always need to know the empirical situation: the drivers, consequences, and outcomes of urban spatial structure and planning policies. And as the data and methods used to characterize the empirical situation become more complex, we need to likewise sharpen our understanding and interpretation of these data and methods, which includes understanding how spatial ways of thinking and explicitly spatial methodological approaches can be used to analyze large datasets and can be better integrated into conventional statistical and newer machine learning methods. 

 am also interested in a number of other specific research areas, including 1) walkability, non-auto commuting patterns, and the economic and environmental impacts of transportation systems; 2) the social, spatial, and environmental determinants of health and wellbeing; and 3) energy efficiceny and retrofitting activity in residential buildings (and how these fit into larger urban energy and transportation sytems).

I serve on the Editorial Boards of Information Geography and the Journal of Geographical Systems, and am a Committee Member of the Irish Transportation Research Network, an Affiliate Member of the Maynooth University Hamilton Institute, an Academic Collaborator at the ADAPT Centre for Digital Media Technology in the Digital Content Transformation (DCT) Strand, and a Fellow of the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago. I received my PhD in Geography from Michigan State University in 2018.

Follow me on BlueSky, Google Scholar, ResearchGate, and LinkedIn for periodic research updates, as well as GitHub for open source code implementations.