New Team Members
We’re excited to welcome four new researchers, Josephine Roper, Ye Hong, Xiang Han, Frédérik Lavictoire to UNA! Their diverse expertise strengthens our mission to measure, integrate, and understand complex urban systems—advancing progress toward net-zero mobility, affordable housing, and human-centered urban futures.
Josephine Roper joined UNA in October as a postdoctoral researcher. She holds a PhD from the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW, following a career as a civil engineer in Australia. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between walkability and house prices in Sydney and contributed new tools for multi-activity accessibility analysis. At UNA, she is contributing to the DSI-funded Urban Data Hub project and advancing research to integrate diverse urban datasets for tracking progress toward net-zero mobility and affordable housing.
Ye Hong joined UNA in September as a postdoctoral researcher. He holds a PhD from ETH Zurich, a master’s in Geomatics from ETH, and a bachelor’s in GIS and Remote Sensing from Sun Yat-sen University. His work spans GIS, urban computing, and human mobility, developing machine-learning methods to model and simulate individual travel behavior from large-scale digital traces. At UNA, he is contributing to the Urban Data Hub and combining traditional travel surveys with large-scale trajectory and mobile phone data to analyze population-level spatiotemporal patterns at the city scale.
Alaric (Xiang) Han joined UNA as a PhD student in October. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Geography with Economics from the LSE and a master’s degree in Urban Spatial Science from UCL. His master’s thesis, conducted with Transport for London, used causal analysis to evaluate whether the Elizabeth Line helped foster clusters of knowledge-intensive jobs near station areas. His PhD will further investigate the spatiotemporal dynamics of housing affordability and its links with transport, as well as future housing and transport scenarios.
Frédérik Lavictoire joined UNA as a PhD student in October. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Montréal. His work spans transport, energy, and data analysis—examining car fleet evolution and electricity demand in Québec, contributing to transport modeling in the MERGE integrated assessment model, and studying hydrogen strategies at the Institut für Energiewirtschaft in Stuttgart. His PhD aims to bridge modeling and decision-making by quantifying how mobility innovations affect energy demand, transport planning, and sociodemographic patterns.