Meet Our Team

Martin leads the Urban Flows’ work on energy, air quality and the modelling of urban processes as complex systems. He is currently leading the Observatory work on developing our digital models, data capture and the exploration of methods to identify features of the built environment. His current work includes the exploration of the relationships between decarbonisation, power grid characteristics and thermal energy demand across scales in order to establish how cities can efficiently decarbonise their energy systems. His objective for the Observatory is to understand the flow of energy, resources and materials across scales and systems in order to help cities reduce their total impact upon the planet.

Steve is responsible for the delivery and operation of the sensing and data collection systems that are the basis of the observatory. With a background in the Telecommunications industry and having studied environmental and energy engineering, Steve has a broad interest in the way infrastructures form and support cities and urban living. In particular, he intends to gain a detailed understanding of how wireless networks, that are becoming increasingly important to support urban systems, are affected by the structural environment.

Hadi’s work and research interests sit at the interface of data-driven urban engineering and planning. Hadi’s overall body of research focuses on the challenges relating to resource consumption and productivity in urban systems often in the context of planetary resource capacity and climate change. Their previous research focused on providing new insights on the effects of spatial scale on urban economic performance balance and the extent to which it is influenced by mobility infrastructure across spatial scales. Hadi’s broader research activity and interests include but are not limited to network analysis of intra- and inter-city urban flows, infrastructure and planning, and city morphology, stocks, and metabolism. Hadi has a keen interest in policy impact of these urban challenges and takes a spatially multi-scale approach to studying them.

Virginia’s research focuses on Urban Stormwater Management and Sustainable Drainage Systems (SuDS); how we can develop engineered drainage systems using natural components such as soil and plants to manage storm flows generated by urban constructs such as buildings, pavements and car parks. Virginia looks at the technical performance of vegetated SuDS (particularly green roofs and ponds) and Green Infrastructure, aiming to understand the processes that control the quantity and quality of urban runoff in order to develop fit-for-purpose models of those processes and generate novel strategies to enable storm water to be managed more effectively and sustainably.

Menglin’s research involves proposing an integrated data capture approach for the detection of insulation absence, defective installation, thermal leakage, and presence of moisture that can be deployed across cities, which utilises machine learning to automate identification in big datasets.

Alex’s PhD project is titled “Pro-active Traffic Management though short-term, long-range state estimation”. His focus is to use a Graph and Game theory approach to modelling traffic flows using the MIDAS data collection system of the UK strategic road network, aiming to lead towards improving intelligent transport infrastructure that can meet the new challenges of smart cities and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV). His PhD is part of the A*STAR scholarship program. Within this programme, the second and third years of the PhD will be spent in Singapore working alongside the A*STAR IHPC research team.

Danielle’s PhD investigates the retrofitting of non-domestic buildings which helps to reduce energy use in the UK. More specifically, her interest revolves around the possibility of automating the process, allowing for quicker design and implementation of building retrofit. She is also examining the effect of accounting for embodied carbon within retrofit design and whether this would discourage or encourage the demolition of existing buildings.

Tom’s research aims to develop and communicate a systemic policy approach for extreme climate change adaptation. He is developing evidence regarding how extreme climate change scenarios drive changes in peri-urban and urban infrastructure and food systems, given the growing need for resources and the decreasing availability of planetary resource stocks and flows, by mapping the key issues across interdisciplinary fields and synthesising evidence to support policy development.
Before joining the University of Sheffield, Tom completed a PhD in climate dynamics, investigating the large-scale atmospheric circulation response to climate change drivers.

Mauricio is a Lecturer in Machine Learning in Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. Mauricio is interested in machine learning in general, its interplay with mathematics and statistics and its applications. In particular, his research interests include probabilistic models, kernel methods, and stochastic processes. He works on the development of new probabilistic models and their application in different engineering and scientific areas that include Neuroscience, Neural Engineering, Systems Biology, and Humanoid Robotics. His work on the Urban Flows Observatory is broadly related to the use of data analytics for learning models of environmental variables that can be used for exploratory and predictive tasks. More recently, he and his team have been using spatial statistics to analyse datasets of air pollution.

Fabio is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield and Head of OAK Group. His research concerns large-scale data acquisition and management. Since 2005, he has been the director of three EC funded projects totalling over €20M and involving 45 partners from academia and industry, and Principal Investigator (PI) in many other projects (4 European, 3 EPSRC, four industrial/governmental and four Innovate UK). Fabio is the designer and lead engineer of a technology for tracking health and wellbeing via mobile phone that has been adopted by Public Health England (with over ½ million downloads to date). He has a patent on terminology recognition in the aerospace domain that has led to the creation of a tool in use to over 10,000 employees at Rolls-Royce Plc. He is also co-creator of two spin-out companies, K-now Technologies Ltd, and the Floow Ltd on large scale data analysis and management (currently one of the 10 fastest growing companies in the UK).

Iñaki received an M.S degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Navarra, Spain, in 2006, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Delaware in 2011. He is currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering of the University of Sheffield, and a Visiting Research Collaborator in the Department of Electrical Engineering of Princeton University. He has previously been a Research Intern with Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, New Jersey, and a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University. His research interests include information theory and communication theory with an emphasis on the application to smart grid problems.

Anna’s research focuses on the health benefits of urban natural environments. She is interested in the ways that engaging with parks and green spaces can make a real difference to our physical and mental health and help to reduce health inequalities. She leads the IWUN project- Improving Wellbeing through Urban Nature- which works to maximise the health impacts of networks of urban green space – green infrastructure – through landscape planning, design and management.

Tim has a research track record of over 20 years in wireless communications systems. The focus of his research is on physical layer signal processing, radio resource management and wireless network planning for 5G and IoT. He has pioneered research on energy efficient mobile cellular communications, the mathematical modelling of medium access control protocols for WiFi, iterative block coding for wireless transmission and spreading sequence design for spread spectrum communications systems. In respect of the Urban Flow Observatory, Tim is interested in the deployment of ultra-dense wireless (sensor) networks with low energy consumption and high spectral efficiency.

Darren is passionate about research conducted at the interface between social physics (people), building physics (buildings) and urban physics (networks, city); and at multiple scales: from the performance of individual buildings in their urban context and the how this is influenced by occupants; through the performance of entire complex urban systems and how their interactions and spatial and functional structures can be improved to maximise metabolic efficiency; to the modelling of national stocks of buildings and how they can be decarbonised. His focus in the observatory is on validation of urban irradiation models for energy simulation.

Tom’s background is primarily in Earth Sciences. In 2014 he received an MSci degree in Environmental Geoscience from the University of Bristol in 2014. In 2015 he embarked on a PhD in Volcanology at the University of Sheffield. This research involves the development of low-cost remote sensing equipment for monitoring volcanoes. As part of this project, Tom has built a UV camera, spectrometer and thermal imaging camera. All of these instruments provide a low-cost alternative to equipment which is already commonly deployed on volcanoes and could significantly reduce the cost of volcano research and monitoring. This interest in remote sensing has led Tom to undertake his current research as part of the Sheffield Urban Flows Observatory project.

Richard has a PhD in energy storage in urban systems. He is interested in the effects of energy storage location and operation mode(s) on its sizing and on the benefits it is able to provide to the distribution system. He is currently working as a Research Associate on the Active Building Centre.

Maud’s research has previously focused on weighing the importance of urban built environment stocks for sustainability, using the Danish city of Odense as a case study. As an industrial ecologist, Maud uses the systems perspective to investigate how to reduce the environmental impacts of cities and their built environment. Her interests include socio-economic metabolism (including urban metabolism), material flow analysis and material stock analysis.

Oktay’s research interests include energy harvesting-aided wireless-powered communications for the Internet of Things.

Xinyi is a research associate in digital urban characterisation. Her work focuses on maintaining a sustainable built environment via improving building performance and reducing building whole life carbon emissions. Her research interests include: whole life carbon assessment, building stock modelling, building energy simulation and machine learning.

Hiu Yi is a graduate student studying in MSc Real Estate Planning and Development. She is an Intern in the RISE team responsible for personal information identification and anonymization. She has an interest in city sustainable development such as urban renewal, and ESG as a consideration in urban planning.