Speakers at Modelling World international

Tom van Vuren has been Chair of Modelling World since its inception in 2006. Operating at the interface of academic robustness and practical pragmatism, he is always on the look-out for better ways to collect data, enhance the efficiency of methods and improve accessibility of transport model results. He is Regional Director for the UK and Europe at Veitch Lister Consulting, a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds, and a Chartered Transport Planning Professional.

Kate Mackay leads the Australia Transport Planning practice for Mott MacDonald. Based in Brisbane, Queensland, she has over 20 years’ experience in strategic transport planning and market research. Kate has a track record in delivering innovative and creative solutions to transport planning and policy issues – driven by data, based on technical analysis, and complemented by an in-depth understanding of how and why people travel. Kate leads Mott MacDonald’s Future Mobility offer in Australia and is co-author of a critically acclaimed paper on the user perspective of MaaS. 

Ali is National Director of Future Transport at VLC. In his role he helps clients understand the impact and potential of new transport technologies and policies using contemporary datasets, analytical techniques and transport models. He also leads VLCs internal research and development function. Ali joined VLC in 2017 after nearly a decade at Transport for London where he developed his expertise in strategic transport modelling, planning and policy.

Dr. Alexa Delbosc is a Senior Lecturer at the Monash Institute of Transport Studies in the Department of Civil Engineering.  She draws from her Master’s in social psychology from Harvard University and PhD in Transport from Monash University to study the intersection between the transport system, travel behaviour and human psychology.  This includes projects such as egocentric bias in transportation professionals, measuring the impact of the transport system on psychological well-being and understanding the psychology of fare evasion.

Prof. Ashish Verma is the Convenor of “IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab. (IST Lab.)”. He is Ph.D. from IIT Bombay and currently serving as Associate Professor at Dept. of Civil Engg., Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, India. He has authored more than 200 research publications in the area of sustainable transportation and road safety. He is the Founding and Current President of the society Transportation Research Group of India (TRG).

Professor David Hensher is Founding Director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at The University of Sydney.

He also co-founded the Thredbo International Conference Series on Competition and Ownership in Passenger Transport. His research interests include travel behaviour, transport project evaluation and financing, more recently on the implications of working from home on transport network performance and land use changes. David has published over 690 papers in leading international transport and economics journals as well as 16 books and has a Google scholar citation index of 60,000.

Serbjeet has over 16 years’ experience in transaction advisory services for transport investments and is a specialist in travel demand modelling and forecasting and transport economics.

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Serbjeet is a qualified project manager and a transport economist with key specialisation in strategic transport modelling and demand and revenue forecasting.

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At Steer, Serbjeet is the Director in India and is responsible for the company’s business in the country. His role is to offer the same high quality and level of service to clients in India and in the wider South Asian region as we do elsewhere in the world.

Revathy is a Principal Engineer and the lead for the strategic modelling team at WSP India.

Prior to WSP, she has worked with Atkins India, Systra MVA Consulting and has supported various transport modelling projects for India, Africa, Middle East and UK regions.

With a background in Intelligent Transport Systems from IIT Bombay and a decade long professional experience, she focuses on delivering affordable, safe and sustainable transport models for national and local authorities across geographies.  She is passionate about data driven decision making and believes in its power to transform the transportation industry.

Phil Goodwin, BSc (Econ), PhD (Civ. Eng.), FCILT, FCIHT, MTPA, is Emeritus Professor of Transport Policy at UCL and UWE.

He was formerly a transport economist at the Greater London Council, director of the Oxford University Transport Studies Unit, a member of SACTRA, Chair of the panel of advisors for the 1998 Transport White Paper, a non-executive director of the Port of Dover, and Professor of Transport Policy at UCL and UWE. Professor Goodwin was appointed a Foundation for Integrated Transport Senior Fellow in 2020.

Luis is Director of Willumsen Advisory Services, of Nommon Solutions and Technologies (a company specialised in the use of big data in transport), and Visiting Professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering at University College London.   He is co-author of the “Modelling Transport” book and author of “Better Traffic and Revenue Forecasting”.  His current interests focus on dealing with uncertainties from disruptive events and new technologies of MaaS and CAVs,  and how to incorporate these in modelling and project appraisal. He is also engaged in the rigorous use of mobile phone and smartcard data to generate trip matrices and mobility insights.

Charlene Rohr is a senior research leader at RAND Europe and codirector of RAND Europe’s Centre for Futures and Foresight Studies. She has over 25 years of experience in undertaking research to better understand factors that influence mobility and travel, using quantitative (discrete choice modelling) and qualitative (literature review, future scenarios) methods.

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Rohr has been involved in developing travel demand forecasting models in the UK, Scandinavia, and Australia. She has also contributed to the design and analysis of stated preference surveys to explore consumer behaviour in the transport, health, and communication sectors.

Graham is Professor of Public Transport at Monash University and has over 40 years experience in transport modelling and travel behaviour research/consulting in Europe, North America, Asia and Australasia.   He Chairs a Standing Committee at the US Transportation Research Board, is a member of the UITP Academic network and the Singapore LTA Research Advisory Board.  He specialises in transit demand modelling and more recently on Covid-19 impacts on travel.  In 2020 he was awarded the Australian Transport Medal by Engineers Australia for his contribution to the transport industry.

Sree is a transportation planner and modeller, with over 7 years of experience in the transport consulting industry.

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She has key experience from different regions like Middle-East, UK and US regions. She has an academic background in Civil Engineering with a Master’s degree in Mathematical Modelling for Transport.

She had started within the industry in Dubai and has also worked in London prior to her move back to Bangalore, India.

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Her interests are in upbringing the transport modelling industry using innovative ways and she is keen to integrate the modelling platforms using latest techniques for better outcomes in the industry ."

Warren Hatch, CEO, Good Judgment, spoke at Modelling World 2020. Back in 2011, the Good Judgment Project, led by Philip Tetlock, author of Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, was the undisputed victor in a tournament led by the US-based Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) to gauge the accuracy of forecasts. Good Judgment Inc is the commercial successor to this research project, and now has a network of superforecasters working on economic, social and investment issues, including transport

Dr Robin Smit is Director at Transport Energy/Emission Research (TER) and an Adjunct Associate Professor with the University of Technology Sydney.
Robin has over 25 years experience in emission, air pollution and climate projects in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East.
Robin's work is published in national and international scientific journals.
He has also presented at various conferences, discussion panels and has lectured in both Europe and Australia.
 

Steven is a Technical Principal - Transport Modelling with SMEC based in Perth, Western Australia. He has a degree in Civil Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Canada and a Graduate Diploma in Applied Finance and Investment from the Securities Institute of Australia. Steven has 35+ years of experience in transport modelling and public transport planning in Canada, the UK and Australia.  Steven is a Fellow of Engineers, Australia and of the Australian Institute of Traffic Planning and Management (AITPM).  Steven is a member of the AITPM’s national transport modelling network (TMN) and was a member of the organising committee for Modelling World International.

Tony Fransos has been working in transport demand forecasting and modelling for 40 years. He has worked on transport planning and infrastructure projects in Australia, Asia, UK and South Africa.  Based on his experiences he has been studying uncertainty in forecasts for several years and written several articles and has presented on the subject at several conferences of the past ten years.

Professor P K Sarkar is presently a visiting faculty engaged in teaching and research and consulting work in the area of Transport Planning at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi as well as SPA, Vijayawada.  He has been actively involved as an expert on various consulting projects in areas of Transport Engineering, Planning, Economics, Road Safety, and ITS. Presently he is an active member of various technical committees at national and international level.

He has written four books on Planning, Economics and ITS. He was deputed to University of Mauritius for academic work as a part of UGC Faculty Exchange Programme in 2009 and was also Commonwealth Academic Fellow at Newcastle University, UK in 2013. 

Darren is a mathematical modeller who joined Tom Van Vuren’s transport modelling and economics team in Birmingham 18 years ago (Darren never had much hair, Tom’s has reduced and greyed significantly). Darren has worked as both a consultant and in regional and local government undertaking transport analysis, and developing transport strategy and policy. This has included trying to figure out how on earth we can reduce the negative impacts of transport without undermining too many of the positive impacts.

David Kriger specialises in freight plans, models, data/surveys, best practice research and P3 due diligence studies, with experience around the world.  He has written or co-written several freight and passenger modelling and data/survey guidelines for authorities in Canada, the USA and Australia.

Trained in transportation engineering and city planning, David has 38 years of experience, the last 10 years with his boutique consultancy, David Kriger Consultants Inc. David is based in Ottawa, Canada.

Chris Loader is a public transport planning professional with 16 years’ experience working for both transport operators and state government in Melbourne, Australia. He is passionate about evidence-based decision making, data visualisation, and gaining a deeper understanding about how transport and cities work and are evolving. In his spare time, Chris authors the widely-referenced blog ChartingTransport.com, where he explores the patterns and trends of transport and urban environments through extensive data visualisation.

Simon is the strategic transport policy and planning lead for City Science in the UK, responsible for expanding our transport planning business and client application of the award winning transport product - Cadence. He brings experience with numerous transport modelling software packages, and a breadth of transport planning project leadership experience from the public and private sectors in the United Kingdom and Australasia. Most recently Simon was a senior manager within Transport for London’s City Planning Directorate, responsible for public transport strategy.

Robin Jackson is Infrastructure Australia’s Chief of Infrastructure Prioritisation, with responsibility for advising governments, industry and the community on the infrastructure investments needed to secure a prosperous and sustainable future.

The Infrastructure Prioritisation team oversees the evaluation of nationally significant infrastructure investment proposals and the development of the Infrastructure Priority List, providing a long-term pipeline of high-quality infrastructure investments to guide government investment.

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Tim is the Demand Forecasting Manager at TfL, his team looks after TfL’s demand and land use and transport interaction (LUTI) models. He has been involved in developing complex demand modelling solutions for over a decade working in consultancy, regional government and internationally

Prashanth has seven years of consulting and research experience in transport infrastructure, across toll roads, electric buses, intelligent mobility, development planning, road safety, maritime and public-private partnerships, including two years in mobile software.

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At Steer, Prashanth primarily plays a leading role in toll road forecasting for large transaction advisory projects, apart from e-mobility, intelligent mobility and development planning.

Dr. Shahin has over 27 years’ experience in Transport Planning and Modelling. He is a Professor for transportation planning in Alexandria University, Egypt. Conducted more than 180 transport consultancy projects with different international and local consultants. Published more than 40 journal articles & conference papers, taught more than 7 specialized transport academic courses, designed & delivered more than 45 training courses to professionals/senior managers from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain.

Jojo Valero is the Transport Demand Modelling Leader at the Auckland Forecasting Centre – a partnership between Waka Kotahi (New Zealand Transport Agency), Auckland Council and Auckland Transport that is responsible for transport modelling in the Auckland region. He is responsible for the development and application of AFC’s strategic land use and transport demand models.

Prior to this, Jojo was involved in the development of traffic assignment models featuring intersection capacity updates. He was project manager for the Auckland Transport Model (ATM2) project -  the development of Auckland’s fully integrated land use and transport models.

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Dr Wesley Soet leads the transport modelling team at Main Roads Western Australia.  He currently manages two key transport surveys in progress across the Perth metropolitan region: the household travel survey and the commercial vehicle survey.  Both surveys undertake multi-day data collection incorporating GPS-based technology.  Wes has a keen interest in the application of the multi-day travel data to improve model estimation.

Neil France joined Infrastructure Victoria in 2018 and is a Policy Advisor with qualifications in civil engineering and architecture. Neil has worked across transport policy reform and was heavily involved in the Transporting Melbourne’s Recovery report’s transport modelling utilising the Melbourne Activity and Agent‑Based Model.

Shalini is Executive Director, Centre of Excellence in Urban Transport and Associate Professor, Faculty of Planning, CEPT University. She is a transport planner with more than 20 years of experience in the transport and urban sector in India and the United Kingdom. She has worked extensively on strategic transport planning & policy and public transport projects including bus and BRT system planning and design in India. Her areas of interest include transport system analysis, demand modelling and planning of public transport systems and operations.

He is a Senior Transport Modeller with 15 years of Transport Planning experience, with outstanding technical expertise in developing models by mastering commercial software VISUM, SATURN, EMME, CUBE, and professional scripting in RStudio, Python, Visual Basics on Excel automation. He has been leading a wide range of transportation assessment projects internationally. Highly skilled in stakeholder management, he has established excellent working relationships with government agencies as well as private clients during his career development. He is the key modeller of the MOTC specialised in strategic transport planning to give technical guidance for major projects, master plans, and traffic impact studies.

Reza Mohammadi has a PhD in Transport Engineering from Imperial College, University of London. He has 35 years of international experience working in Europe, Far East Asia and Middle East. He has lead the development of multi-modal transport models and managed complex transport infrastructure projects. He was a visiting professor at American University in Sharjah and is currently giving lecturers on sustainable transport planning at British University in Dubai. He set up his company in Dubai in 2008 providing transport planning, modelling and engineering services to public and private companies.

Graeme is involved in assessing the transport and economic analysis and business cases supporting proposals seeking central government funding through the National Land Transport Programme.

Graeme has been transport planning and modelling for over 40 years, and in his 30 years as a consultant developed and used models to plan for future transport needs in nearly all cities within New Zealand.  He was also responsible for developing modelling software used in most cities in the country.

His recent focus has been on dealing with uncertainty, especially the incorporation of uncertainty in the decision-making process.

Tony Brennand’s career in the transport sector in New Zealand spans four decades with employment in a variety of government, including local government, entities and private sector roles. Tony currently works for Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency as a Principal Advisor, Strategic Transportation. Tony also has had a long involvement in supporting the transport sector through his professional affiliations which includes executive member (former national chairman) of the Engineering NZ Transportation Group, executive member of the NZ Models User Group, Australasian chairman of the Trips Data Bureau, and executive member of the Australasian Transport Research Forum. 

As Head of Innovation at PTV Group, Dr. Noekel is responsible for novel applications and methodological development of the PTV Vision Traffic Suite of transportation planning software, including PTV Visum (demand modelling), PTV Vissim (traffic microsimulation), PTV Optima (real-time traffic management). He participates in numerous collaborations with the academic community in transportation modelling and has published on diverse topics, particularly traffic assignment.

Gerard de Jong is Director of Significance and Research Professor at the Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds. He studied spatial economics and obtained a PhD in econometrics (on car ownership and use models) in 1989. Since then he has been working for Hague Consulting Group, RAND Europe, ITS Leeds and Significance. He has been responsible for modelling work for several international, national and regional transport models both in passenger and freight transport.

Greg works with the Transport Lab, University of Kentucky. The lab's goal is to provide the information necessary to make smart decisions about transportation infrastructure investments and about how to best incorporate new technology into the existing transportation system. It develops sophisticated modelling tools to forecast the effects of proposed projects and analyses new and emerging data sources to understand the effects of past projects.

Dr Jain is presently working as General Manager (Operations) in the Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS), an IT arm of the Ministry of Railways, Government of India in New Delhi. He has approximately 20 years of experience and, prior to this, he has worked as lead operations, Delhi Division, Northern Railways, Joint General Manager/Operations and Principal Training Institute, Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. 

Sonal has over 20 years’ experience in the acquisition and management of Transport Infrastructure design, ITS, transport planning, modelling and research projects for clients in the Europe, Africa, Middle East and India. 

Matthew Juckes is President of Aimsun Inc based in New York, USA. He has led Aimsun's activity throughout North America, including prestigious real-time, simulation-based, integrated corridor management deployments in San Diego and Florida.

Gav Jackman heads up Aimsun’s UK business, which he joined in 2017. Gav bought his ITS background and experience to his role as project director for the NEVFMA traffic management project in Oxfordshire, UK with integrated air dispersion modelling.

Dr Pinjari’s research is in mathematical modelling of human choice (consumer) behaviour in infrastructure and service systems, particularly in transportation systems. He uses choice modelling and statistical/econometric methods for travel behaviour analysis; passenger and freight travel demand modelling; public transportation systems planning; and integrated land-use and transport modelling.

Dr Patrizia Franco is technical lead for Demand Modelling at Connected Places Catapult (formerly known as Transport Systems Catapult). She is interested in research and innovation in new and emerging mobility services, Agent-based, Activity-based Modelling, demand forecasting and multi-modal modelling for future transport schemes in order to achieve greater sustainability and resilience in smart cities.

“Our increasing frustration with growing traffic congestion is matched by our inability to doing something about it. We need to do more with less as our problems become more complex and solutions more expensive. Creative and innovative solutions are needed to address today's transportation challenges, but they need to be cost-effective, tied to our goals, and supported by technical analyses rooted in common sense. We can meet the challenge because we must.”

Dr Uwe Reiter joined PTV Group 21 years ago. He is currently Global Project Director, reporting to the Vice President for Project Management and Services and manages the large, complex and critical projects at PTV AG. He is an expert in Sustainable Transport and Mobility, with his academic, engineering and planning experience going back to his position of Rees Jeffrey's lecturer for Transport and the Environment at Imperial College for Science, Technology and Medicine in London (UK) between 1995 and 1996.

Paul is an independent transport modeller with 27 years’ experience delivering projects the world over. Prior to becoming independent, Paul led PTV’s global Pre-Sales team at the pioneering end of PTV’s modelling solutions, particularly in the field of shared mobility, electric mobility, urban logistics and real-time traffic management. Paul’s practical experience and influence has helped shape PTV’s product portfolio delivering proof of concepts and projects in Japan, North & South America, the Middle East and across Europe. Having worked and collaborated with public transport agencies, consultancy partners, OEMs and government agencies Paul is currently engaged on the NEOM future city project providing a valuable mobility evidence base to support the evolution of NEOM’s design. 

My objective is to promote evidence-driven decision making in public and/or private sector by narrowing focus to high quality data collection, application of state-of-the-art methods and transport modelling tools.