My career at TRG began in 2006, when I started work on a PhD on demand forecasting for new local railway stations and services. While undertaking my PhD research I reached the final of the 2007 BA Perspectives competition, and won the 2009 Smeed Prize for the best student paper at the Universities' Transport Study Group Annual Conference. In 2009 I was awarded an EPSRC PHD+ research fellowship to undertake a project titled ‘A Decision Support System For Optimising Local Rail Networks'. My contract was subsequently extended to allow me to work on a range of research projects relating both to rail and to transport more widely (see my ‘Research' tab for more details), and I was promoted to the position of Senior Research Fellow in 2012. I was appointed to a lecturing post at TRG effective from February 2014, and then promoted to Associate Professor effective from March 2019.
Throughout my career I have worked hard to disseminate my research to interested parties in academia, government and industry and to the general public. I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a member of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a Chartered Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport.
I have previously served as Secretary (2016-2019) and Membership Secretary (2014-2016) of the Royal Geographical Society’s Transport Geography Research Group, as a member of the Rail Research UK Association Executive Committee (2014-2018) and as Honorary Secretary of the Universities' Transport Study Group (2011-2012). In 2012 I spent time as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute for Transport and Logistics Studies, University of Sydney.
Before moving to TRG I obtained an MSc in Transport from Imperial College London and University College London, and a first class honours degree in Geography from the University of Oxford. During both degrees I undertook transport-related research projects, looking respectively at the occurrence of fatal railway accidents across Europe, and the potential for microfranchising of local UK rail operations. I also gained first-hand experience of working in the transport industry as a travel advisor for First North Western Trains and carrying out public transport surveys for Flintshire County Council.
Alongside my work at TRG between 2006 and 2013 I was project manager for a major new encyclopaedic reference work, the ‘Companion to Public Road Transport History'. This involved coordinating the work of a ten member editorial board and over 140 individual authors, to produce a 400,000 word book which was published in December 2013.
