With 17 universities as part of our cohort of iMOVE Partners, we talk and work with a large number of academics. On this page we will list some of them … if we were to list them all this would be a very long page indeed!
We will add to this page from time to time, but please find below some of the key researchers we work with.
Click on the pictures to display a short biography of each academic.
University of Western Australia
Sharon Biermann is Professor and Director of the Planning and Transport Research Centre (PATREC), hosted at UWA.
PATREC is a collaboration between three WA universities, three WA government departments and the WA Local Government Association, with a mandate to conduct collaborative, applied research and teaching in support of policy in the connected spaces of transport and land use planning.
Her role includes leading and conducting research projects in the areas of integrated land use and transport futures, smarter personal travel decisions, integrated freight system optimisation, emerging technology, network optimisation and intelligence, and transport infrastructure investment risk management.
With a PhD in Geography, her specific areas of expertise include: scientific research leadership and management of integrated planning and infrastructure programs, Planning Support Systems and integrated land use and infrastructure planning and modelling.
Charles Darwin University
Hamish Campbell is the Associate Dean of Research & Innovation at Charles Darwin University and the Director of The North Australia Centre for Autonomous Systems (NACAS). He is a Professor of Spatial Science and runs a large research group who utilise new technologies for hypothesis driven research.
NACAS conducts integrated industry-focused research into the application of Autonomous Systems across industries, businesses, and other sectors in northern Australia and the Asia Pacific regions. The aim of NACAS is to assist the Northern Territory Government, local industries, and businesses to facilitate and support workforce transformation in north Australia while attracting national and international investment into research innovation.
Located at Charles Darwin University (CDU) NACAS is ideally placed to integrate Autonomous Systems into a diverse range of sectors, industries and businesses important to the Northern Australian economy.
University of Tasmania
Associate Professor Chen has worked as an academic at the Australian Maritime College/UTAS since 2004.
Before joining AMC, Associate Professor Chen had working experiences in different sectors in Taiwan, including Customs, banking and education. Currently, she is the Head of Department of Maritime and Logistics Management at AMC.
In addition to the leadership role, her responsibilities at AMC include teaching and research. Peggy holds a PhD in Port Management. She has research interests and extensive publications in the fields of maritime logistics, port management and supply chain management.
Research in these areas is imperative to supply chain efficiency and effectiveness, which contributes to international trade and business.
Swinburne University of Technology
Hussein Dia is professor of Future Urban Mobility in the School of Engineering.
He currently serves as the Chair of the Department of Civil and Construction Engineering; Deputy-Director of the Smart Cities Research Institute; and Program Leader of the Institute’s Future Urban Mobility research program. In his role as Chair of Civil Engineering, he works alongside a highly dedicated academic team who have collectively positioned Civil Engineering as one of the highly regarded Civil Engineering departments in the country. In this role he also works with internal and external stakeholders to build on the success of the team and position the Department for further growth, success, and recognition.
As Deputy Director of the Smart Cities Research Institute, he facilitates interdisciplinary research and actively engages with external organisations to identify issues and needs that the Institute can address through its thematic research programs. Hussein also leads one of the Institute’s research programs on future urban mobility.
Professor Dia’s research interests are in the convergence of technology, infrastructure and human elements in urban environments. His current work is focused on disruptive mobility and harnessing digital innovations to unlock potential opportunities for low carbon mobility.
His current research includes investigations of how autonomous vehicles, blockchain, Internet of Things and the sharing economy are set to transform mobility in the world’s cities. Hussein’s standing in this field is demonstrated by more than 100 publications including books on ITS and low carbon mobility for future cities.
He is also a Chartered Professional Engineer, Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Fellow of Engineers Australia, and Fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Hussein previously served as Board Member of ITS Australia, and currently serves as Senior Editor for the international journal IEEE Transactions on ITS.
For more about Hussein, read his interview with iMOVE, Hussein Dia: Tackling the urban transport future
University of NSW
Professor Vinayak Dixit is the IAG Chair of Risk in Smart Cities, Director of the Research Centre for Integrated Transport Innovation (rCITI) as well as the Director Travel Choice Simulation Laboratory (TRACSLab) at the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UNSW Sydney, Australia.
His research focuses on studying risk in the transportation infrastructure system as it relates to connected automated vehicles, electric vehicles, highway safety, travel time uncertainty, as well as natural and man-made disasters. His research has relied on using highly disaggregate data to infer individual preferences under risk and uncertainty, and its implication on systems.
His projects have been funded by the Australian Research Council, United States National Science Foundation, as well as transportation agencies across the world including Australia, U.S., Indonesia, India and U.A.E. He is currently leading a large grant with industry (insurers and OEMs) and Government partners to study impact of interactions with other road users in an autonomous environment.
University of Sydney
Professor David Hensher is Founding Director of the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies at The University of Sydney.
He also co-founded the Thredbo International Conference Series on Competition and Ownership in Passenger Transport. His research interests include travel behaviour, transport project evaluation and financing, more recently on the implications of working from home on transport network performance and land use changes.
David has published over 690 papers in leading international transport and economics journals as well as 16 books and has a Google scholar citation index of 60,000.
For more about David, read his interview with iMOVE, David Hensher: Transport economist
Queensland University of Technology
Professor Michal Milford is a leading researcher in the autonomous vehicle space, across fundamental research, applied research and policy development, both in Australia and internationally.
He is a long-term international judge for the $8.5M Dubai World Self-Driving Transport Challenge events (2018–21); a non-executive director on the board of the Qld Motor Trades Association Institute; Automation Technology Lead at Mining3; and member of the National Transport Commission’s Automated Vehicle Industry Insights Group.
He has led or co-led industry projects with leading Fortune 100 and multinational companies in the autonomous vehicles space spanning automotive, mining (Caterpillar, Mining3, Queensland Government) and defence (Rheinmetall Defence Australia with DST, RMIT, and CSIRO/DATA61). Michael has led multiple investigations into autonomous vehicle technology in the Australian context, working with the iMOVE Co-operative Research Centre, the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads and the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland (RACQ), including leading a team to develop of one of Australia’s first custom on-road research vehicle platforms ZOE1, which completed one of the first widespread studies of autonomous vehicle technology in Australia.
Michael is in high demand in the autonomous vehicles space, and presented to many self-driving car organisations around the world including Google, Uber, Argo AI, Nuro, and AutoX.
For more about Michael, read his interview with iMOVE, Michael Milford: Positioning the future
University of Sydney
Eduardo Mario Nebot is a Professor at the University of Sydney in the School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering. He was appointed as the Patrick Chair of Automation and Logistics in 2004 and has been the Director of the Australian Centre for Field Robotics since 2011.
He received the Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, (Argentina) and MS and PhD degrees from Colorado State University, USA. Fellow of IEEE and FTSE.
Professor Nebot has a substantial track record in robotics and automation. He has published more than 300 Referee Conference and Journal publications and given a large number of keynotes and industrial presentations. The major impact of his fundamental research is in autonomous system, navigation, mining safety and Intelligent Transport Systems.
Over the past 15 years, he has managed a large number industrial collaboration research projects in the area of Field Robotics. His fundamental research contributions are having a significant impact in the profession. They are already part of new key autonomous technologies deployed in various industrial environments such as mining, stevedoring, cargo handling, and autonomous urban vehicles.
He is currently leading various industry collaborative research projects in autonomy with Ford US, Renault France, Transport for NSW and iMOVE Australia. His research group is having an active role in the deployment of new innovative technology in the intelligent transport area involving smart vehicles.
Queensland University of Technology
Professor Andry Rakotonirainy is the Director of CARRS-Q and founder of its Intelligent Transport Systems human factors research program, establishing its Advanced Driving Simulator laboratory.
With 25 years research and management experience in computer science, he brings advanced expertise in road safety and ITS design and implementation.
He is a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts and is a regular member of EU funded projects’ advisory boards. He has authored over 250 internationally refereed papers in prestigious journals and conferences. The impact of his research is significant, with one paper cited 1034 times (4928citations in total), and he has an h-index of 34. He has been awarded 11 Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, serves on international conference and journal committees, and reviews internationally competitive grants.
Professor Rakotonirainy’s Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) research has been recognised both nationally and internationally. He has proactively investigated the use of existing and emerging ITS through multiple disciplines such as computer science, mathematics, human factors, engineering, psychology and sociology.
Andry’s research has made extensive use of driving simulators, traffic simulators and instrumented vehicles for developing system prototypes, assessing cost-benefits, understanding human errors and evaluating system deployment. He has been successful in securing numerous competitive grants and has established partnerships with many road safety stakeholders.
Presently, he is involved in a €6,4 million EU-funded (Horizon 2020) project called Levitate led by Loughborough University on ‘Societal Level Impacts of Connected and Automated Vehicles’. He is also the lead researcher on two projects as part of the Queensland Government’s CAVI initiative on Automated and Cooperative Vehicles.
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University of Melbourne
Majid Sarvi is the chair in Transport Engineering, the professor in Transport for Smart Cities, and the program director of ‘Transport Technologies’ at the University of Melbourne.
He is the founder and the director of the AIMES (Australian Integrated Multimodal EcoSystem). AIMES is the world’s first and largest connected urban testing ecosystem for implementing and testing of emerging connected transport technologies at large scale and in complex urban environments which involves over 40 partners from government and leading Australian and global industry partners.
He has over 23 years of professional, academic and research experience in the areas of traffic and transport engineering. His research is multidisciplinary with international outlook and both theoretically oriented and applied in nature. His fields of research cover a range of topics, including: connected multimodal transport network, crowd dynamic modelling and simulation and network vulnerability assessment and optimisation.
For more about Majid, read his interview with iMOVE, Majid Sarvie: AIMES for the future
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University of South Australia
Dr. Akshay Vij is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Choice. He has previously worked as lecturer and post-doctoral scholar at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, with joint research appointments at the Institute of Transportation Studies and the Institute of Urban and Regional Development. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering, also from UC, Berkeley.
Vij’s research has made significant contributions to the development of statistical methods for the study of human behaviour, and their application to transport contexts. Findings from his research have been published in some of the most prestigious academic journals in the discipline, such as Transportation Research Parts A, B and C; presented at multiple national and international academic and industry conferences, workshops and symposiums; and covered by popular media outlets, such as The Conversation, Channel Nine and ABC Far North.
For more about Vij, read his interview with iMOVE, Akshay Vij: Choice modeller