UMF Faculty
Dr. Marco te Brömmelstroet
Professor in Urban Mobility Futures at the University of Amsterdam
He holds master degrees in Infrastructure Planning and Geographical Information Management, His teaching in Planning Bachelor and Master's programs centers around the (problematic) integration of land use and mobility and ways to improve this. His research is strongly intertwined with planning practice. He has done several studies on how to improve the use of knowledge in urban strategy making processes.
[Profile page of University of Amsterdam | Linkedin Profile]
Dr. Anna Nikolaeva
Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam.
Her research focuses on futures of mobility and transitions to more sustainable and inclusive mobility. Her main fascination is the meaning that individuals and communities give to mobility and how that meaning shapes our social-spatial environments, economies and cultures. As part of the project “Smart Cycling Futures” she has conducted research on smart cycling innovation and the impact of technology on possibilities of collecting and using cycling data. She also collaborates with partners in practice through “living labs” in which cycling innovations are tested. She is initiator and curator of “Cities and Mobilities” series of events.
[Profile page of University of Amsterdam | LinkedIn profile]
George Liu
PhD candidate | (Online) teaching
He studies how ideas from urban design can guide the creation of healthy and attractive environments that encourage cycling as a practical and delightful mode of daily transport. His previous research at the University of Toronto includes a study of cycling patterns in the suburban communities of Toronto, Canada. His Masters project evaluated the effectiveness of bicycle mentorship programs in sustaining long-term transport behaviour change. George Liu is cross-appointed at the Department of the Built Environment at Eindhoven University of Technology.
[Profile page of University of Amsterdam | LinkedIn profile]
Ran Zhang
PhD Candidate
She is interested in the urban cycling environment, cyclists’ behaviors, emotions, and big data analysis. Her research will focus on cycling-friendly environment improvement. She is attempting to propose cycling optimization strategies considering the public experience, citizen engagement, and policy makers’ intentions. Before joining the UMF faculty, she obtained her master's degree in Landscape Architecture in China. She has contributed to natural urban health and well-being in blue spaces through social media data analysis.
Jonne Silonsaari
PhD Candidate
His study focuses on childhood mobilities and cycling promotion initiatives using action research methodology. He examines how institutions shape childhood mobilities and how children, parents and cycling advocates can imagine and experiment new ways of promoting children’s autonomous mobility. Participatory and transformative methodology allows tangible examination of change processes where everyday mobility and childhood are mutually constituted. His background is in sport sociology, driving the interest to urban cycling as a corporeal practice.
Trey Hahn
MSc. Urban Planning I Researcher
He researches the human experience of cycling and an iterative, collaborative (agile) way of working in planning organizations. He is a co-organizer of the Unraveling the Cycling City MOOC and Planning the Cycling City summer school, and is also the founder of Designing a Bicycle User Experience (BUX), where he maintains an open toolkit of human-centered design methods for cycling. Trey combines his design education from the New School in New York with a MSc. in planning from the University of Amsterdam to provide a unique perspective and expertise in the field of cycling and urban design.
[Personal Blog I LinkedIn profile]
Inés Alveano-Aguerrebere
Postdoc Researcher
Inés holds a Md in Public Health and a PhD in Policies. She has worked at a public health institution in Mexico for more than a decade. She is passionate about the links between the shape of cities and social well-being. As an activist, she writes for local journals and she has ventured into the production of videos on mobility: interviews and a short film that was selected finalist at a film festival.
Inés will be studying acceptance pathways of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) and supporting the research on how systemic traffic violence is reported by media in Spanish-speaking contexts.
Eva Kwakman
Junior researcher
Eva is interested in public space and social justice (who/what public space is for) and in societal discourse on these topics. Her research at Urban Mobility Futures will focus on the framing of traffic crashes in Dutch media and the impact of this framing on those that were directly involved in crashes and their next of kin. Moreover, she will further develop the online database thecrashes.org together with Marco te Brömmelstroet by creating a digital filter for news articles on traffic crashes that will visualize the state of the discourse over time. Another objective is to use all these findings to make a direct positive impact on the media discourse itself. Eva’s background is a master’s degree in sociology (specifically ‘social problems and social policy’) at the University of Amsterdam.
Anne-Carlijn Kommers
BAM Infra Netherlands | Junior Researcher
She works for BAM at the department Traffic management. Before working for BAM she was studying Transportation Science at the University of Hasselt (Belgium). Her master project was about the influence of a light lane on the sidewalk and the behavior of the crossing pedestrians. She did an observational study to research the impact of the light lane as well as a study about the subjective safety at cycle paths. For this, she made different movies of cycle paths and asked people to evaluate and rank the cycle paths. A distinction was made between illuminance, color, and the degree of evenly distributed light.
BAM and the University of Amsterdam work together for the project "Together on the Cycle path". For this, Anne-Carlijn is the researcher and contact person.
Monik Kokkola
Junior Researcher
Her research examines everyday urban life and how difference is negotiated in common spaces of urban encounter. Monik is primarily interested in the lived experiences of the city and how different people experience, shape and give meaning to their respective socio-spatial environments and cultures. Her master’s research focused on the relational and affective significances of daily urban mobility practices through the lens of bus passengering in Finnish cities, and how meaningful encounters across difference can be made possible through embodied mobile engagement. Her research at Urban Mobility Futures will investigate how COVID-19 related changes to daily mobility practices are affecting patterns of social in/exclusion, and what long-term relational understandings of urban mobility processes can be called into question by COVID-19 induced socio-spatial changes.
Paulina Fried
Guest Researcher
She is a master student in "Cities & Sustainability" at Aalborg University, Denmark. During her research internship at the chair for UMF, she developed in open databank with relevant publications and projects dealing with impacts of COVID-19 on human mobility. In her current research she focusses on gender inequalities due to COVID-19 on urban mobility in the light of 'mobility justice'.
Jarvis Suslowicz
Research Apprentice
They are a student on the Research Master's in Urban Studies at the UvA, interested in how housing and mobility justices intersect. They hope to develop a thesis project surrounding the experiences of mobility as a livelihood for bicycle couriers in Oslo and Amsterdam. With the UMF they will be helping on a project looking at stigmas attached to particular users of bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands.
Rindert Oost
Research Apprentice
Rindert is a research master student in Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. With his bachelor’s degree in American Studies, he has a broad research interest including how people perceive and use public space and infrastructure. Currently, he is doing an academic internship at the UMF.
Karima Chamlal
Research Apprentice
She is a master student within the Research Master Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam. She will do her apprenticeship at UMF to support ongoing research about the contemporary challenges urban mobility innovations encounter and she will explore how these innovations can support sustainability and inclusiveness. During her Bachelors degree (Human Geography and Spatial Planning) at Utrecht University she researched which innovative tools and policies are most effective to reduce congestion on motorways.
