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Bio
Mark Birkin is Professor of Spatial Analysis and Policy in the School of Geography, University of Leeds. He has longstanding interests in mathematical modelling of urban and regional systems including geodemographics, microsimulation, agent-based modelling, and spatial decision-support systems.
Mark has a notable track record of collaboration, including ten years as an executive director of Geographical Modelling and Planning (GMAP) Limited. In this time, GMAP developed from occasional consulting projects into a market analytics business with 120 employees and global reach, working with household name partners such as Ford Motor Company, Asda-Walmart, HBoS, Exxon-Mobil and GSK. An ethos of collaboration with external partners in business and the public sector continues in his current role as Director of the Consumer Data Research Centre (CDRC), a national investment within the ESRC Big Data Network. He is also PI for the ESRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Analytics which will coordinate sixty postgraduate research projects in tandem with external partners.
Since 2014, Mark has been Director of the Leeds Institute for Data Analytics (LIDA). Having started as a partnership between CDRC and the MRC Medical Bioinformatics, LIDA now supports 40 projects and programmes with more than £50M of funded research, bringing together over 200 researchers from across all eight faculties at the University.
He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Projects
Clim Recal
Collection of methods to de-bias climate projection data (sub-component of DyME-CHH but also used as independent codebase)
DyME - Climate, Heat and Health (DyME-CHH)
Use disaggregated climate data to model the health effects of heat exposure in different population groups, based on where they live and how they move
Synthetic Population Catalyst
Tool that creates a synthetic population for any area within Great Britain, including socio-demographic, health and daily activity data. Calibrated to 2020, with projections of some variables to between 2012 and 2039.