Professor Daniel Arribas-Bel PhD

Personal Statement

Dani Arribas-Bel is interested in computers, cities, and data. He is Professor in Geographic Data Science at the Department of Geography and Planning of the University of Liverpool, where he runs the MSc in Geographic Data Science and is a member of the Geographic Data Science Lab. He is the Deputy Programme Director for Urban Analytics at The Alan Turing Institute, where he is also an ESRC Fellow. Prior to his appointment in 2022, Dani was Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in Geographic Data Science at the University of Liverpool, lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham (UK), postdoctoral researcher at the VU University in Amsterdam (Netherlands), postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University’s GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation (US), and PhD student at Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain).

Dani's research combines modern computation and new forms of data to understand cities. His substantive interests focus on the spatial dimensions of cities and how urban activites unfold over space and time. Methodologically, he is at the forefront of efforts arguing for tighter integration between geography and data science, and works to leverage recent technologies that generate new data such as high-resolution satellite imagery or data derived from smartphones. He has published more than 50 articles in journals such as PLoS ONE, Demography, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, or Environment and Planning (A/B/C). He is profoundly committed to open science and interdisciplinary collaboration. Dani has been a member of the development team of PySAL, the Python library for spatial analysis, since its first release in 2009; has created the Python library contextily, which enables access to web tiles; and has participated as mentor in three Google Summer of Code programmes. Together with Serge Rey and Levi Wolf, he is currently writing a book on Geographic Data Science in Python.

Dani has been invited to give talks at universities around the world, including India, Japan, Brazil, or Colombia. He holds honorary positions at the University of Chicago's Center for Spatial Data Science and the Center for Geospatial Sciences of the University of California Riverside, and he is a member of the OECD's Geospatial Data Lab, where he coordinates a workstream on open pipelines. Dani currently serves as co-editor of the journal “Environment and Planning B - Urban Analytics & City Science” and the "Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series A - Statistics in Society", and is member of the editorial board of Spatial Economic Analysis, Geographical Analysis, and Transactions in GIS. Since 2017, he chairs the Quantitative Methods Research Group of the Royal Geographical Society.