Looking back on 2024 and forward to 2025

news
Completing my Civil Service job, new role at the University of Leeds and family updates
Published

January 3, 2025

In this post I look back on 2024 and forward to 2025.

Work in 2024

I completed my two-year contract at Active Travel England where I was Director of Data and Analysis. I got a promotion to Professor, and from January 2025 am back to a single full-time job at the University of Leeds.

Key achievements at Active Travel England:

  • Set up a grant funding agreement between ATE and the Alan Turing Institute
  • Instigated the ATIP project (plan.activetravelengland.gov.uk)
  • The SchoolRoutes project for identifying school routes for active travel investment

Academic highlights

  • Two books with CRC Press (published in 2025):
    • Geocomputation with R (second edition)
    • Geocomputation with Python
  • Keynote at Mobile Tartu conference
  • CRUSE project published (cruse.bike)
  • Biclar web application for Lisbon

Open source contributions

  • od2net R interface for route network generation
  • spanishoddata R package for Spanish OD data
  • parenx Python package for network simplification
  • Contributions to anime package for linestring matching

Community projects

  • Bike Fix Sunday: Community bike repair project (150 members)
  • Chapeltown Cohousing: Got a shared electric cargo bike
  • Oaty Cortado run club: Weekly runs with mates

Personal update

I became a father again! Baby girl Rosa was born on November 12th, 2024. Big brother Kit is being excellent.

Looking forward to 2025!