João De Albuquerque

Professor João Porto de Albuquerque is Professor in Urban Analytics at Urban Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow, and he is a Deputy Director of the Urban Big Data Centre (UBDC). Professor Porto de Albuquerque is a geographer and computer scientist with an interdisciplinary background. His research adopts a transdisciplinary approach to participatory urban analytics, intersecting urban studies, digital geographies, geographic information science, data science, information systems 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 urban data analytics, with the goal of enabling transformations to urban sustainability and climate resilience.

Professor Porto de Albuquerque is leading a research programme centred around the empowerment of vulnerable and deprived communities with citizen-generated data to improve resilience to health and environmental risks. 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.

He has secured competitive research funds for his research in excess of £3.8m as lead investigator (£13m+ as co-investigator) from diverse national and international funding bodies (e.g. Global Challenges Research Fund, Leverhulme Trust, AHRC, 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.

After studying Computer Science, Social Sciences and Philosophy at the University of Campinas, Brazil, Prof Porto de Albuquerque did a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Campinas and in the Technical University of Dortmund, Germany (2006). He was awarded a prestigious fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2006-2008) to conduct post-doctoral research in social studies of information systems at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and at the Information Systems Group of the London School of Economics and Politics (LSE). He worked as Assistant Professor at the School of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the University of São Paulo (2008-2010) and at the Department of Computer Systems of the Institute of Mathematical and Computing Sciences of the University of São Paulo (2010-2015), Brazil. From 2013-2016 he acted as a Visiting Professor in Geographic Information Science at the Institute of Geography of Heidelberg University, Germany with a fellowship funded by the DFG’s Excellence Programme. In 2016, João took up the post of Associate Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick to lead the MSc in Urban Analytics and Visualisation, in which he played a pivotal role in curriculum development in partnership with Warwick's Department of Computer Science. He was also Co-Director of the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities and Warwick Director of the Centre for Urban Science and Progress London (CUSP London) in partnership with King's College London and New York University. Between January 2019 and September 2021, he was Professor and Director of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick.

Research interests

• Participatory urban analytics.
• Climate action and adaptation in cities.
• Urban resilience and sustainable development.
• Disasters studies and resilience to natural hazards.
• Informal settlements, slums and deprived neighbourhood regeneration.
• Digital geography and critical data studies.
• Social media analytics.
• Participatory mapping and community data generation.
• Citzen science and volunteered/crowdsourced geographic information.
• Spatial data analysis of urban resilience and health.