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In 2017 the Transport Institute formed an advisory board of senior professionals with careers in transport research and practice and representative UCL researchers. They all share a commitment to high-quality research and informed debate on transport matters, with particular interest in cross-disciplinary work and policy-relevant research. They also support the efforts of higher education institutions to engage with such debates within and beyond a strictly academic remit.
From their own areas of expertise, board members are able to aid the advancement of UCL's Transport Institute and are willing to provide strategic advice to its management team on opportunities for the Institute to respond to the priorities of governments, research councils and other funders, non-governmental organisations and the private sector. See below for profiles of our Board Members.
- Sue Percy, Chair of the Advisory Board, CEO Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation
Sue is currently a board member of DfT's Highways Efficiency Maintenance Programme; sits on the Royal Academy of Engineering's Diversity Leadership sub group and is a member of London South Bank University Court.
Sue has worked in the built environment sector for over 20 years as Director of Professional Services at the Royal Town Planning Institute, and Head of the Academic Department of Urban, Environment and Leisure Studies at London South Bank University. She has also worked in local government.
- Lynn Basford, Managing Director at Dominic Lawson Bespoke Planning
Lynn joined Dominic Lawson Bespoke Planning in May 2016. Her experience as a qualified town planner and transport planner spans nearly 30 years across both the public and private sector. She has worked in England, Ireland and the Middle East developing land use and transport masterplans for large scale developments. Her work has covered project management of complex applications, including the allocation of strategic sites through to planning applications, development plan preparation, and policy development. She leads the preparation and audits of transport assessments and transport statements.
She regularly appears as an expert witness on transport matters for both the public and private sector clients at public inquiries, examinations, and development consent order hearings.
Lynn has considerable experience in Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, and as a result of her work, has been appointed to the Council for the National Infrastructure Planning Association.
Lynn's work has contributed, and continues to contribute to the successful delivery of large schemes such as the Silvertown Tunnel in London - a major Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project; 20,000 dwellings in the Clonburris Development Zone, in Dublin, Ireland; and 1,200 dwellings, a community centre, a primary school and a leisure centre in Shinfield West, Wokingham.
She is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation, a member of the the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Council of the National Infrastructure Planning Association, and the Council of the National Infrastructure Planning Association. She is also a founder member of the Centre for Transport and Psychology with Bath, Exeter and Surrey Universities.
- John Dales, Director of Urban Movement
John runs a consultancy specialising in transport planning and the design of urban streets and spaces. With an MSc in Transport from Imperial College/ University College London, he began life as a transport professional in 1984, working first as a traffic engineer for JMP Consultants, and next for the London Borough of Newham. He joined urban design consultancy Urban Initiatives in 1996, and established Urban Movement at the start of 2010.
His work over the past decade has focused on two related fields of endeavour: the design of streets and spaces in complex urban environments; and the access and movement aspects of urban development projects at all scales. John is the immediate past Chair of the Transport Planning Society, a Trustee of Living Streets, a streets design advisor to several UK local authorities, and author of the monthly 'Street Talk' column in Local Transport Today.
- Maria Kamargianni, Lecturer, UCL Energy Institute
Maria is a Lecturer in Transport and Energy and the Head of MaaSLab at the Energy Institute of University College London. Her published research has won several awards, and focuses on mobility as a service (MaaS), new mobility services, transport and travel behaviour modelling and econometrics. She has extensive experience in survey design, data handling, and modeling combined Revealed Preferences (RP) and Stated Preferences (SP) discrete choice models, as well as latent variable models in which the attitudes and perceptions of decision makers are taken into account in the choice process. Maria is the Principal Investigator of several MaaS- and travel behaviour-related projects. She has also been included in the list with the Top-10 MaaS influencers in the world. She works closely with the public sector and industry to transfer the research results to the real world.
- Jon Lamonte CEO, Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM)
Jon's portfolio covers rail, bus, tram, highways, cycling and other forms of active transport. TfGM is the executive delivery arm of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.
Jon Lamonte was the CEO of Tube Lines from 2011 - 12, including the critical period of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Tube Lines, as part of Transport for London, was responsible for the maintenance, renewal and upgrade of the Underground infrastructure on the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly lines.
Jon joined from the Royal Air Force where he fulfilled a number of senior operational roles and led major project delivery. His most recent role was Chief of Staff, Strategy, Policy and Plans, which included co-leading the Strategic Defence and Security Review into the maritime programme for the Ministry of Defence (MoD).
Prior to this Jon was Director General Finance for Defence Equipment and Support, the MoD's £17bn a year procurement and logistics organisation. Other roles included running the RAF's largest base, Brize Norton, with over 4,500 people and three fleets of transport and air-to-air refuelling aircraft.
- Deirdre O'Reilly, Highways England
Deirdre is currently on secondment to Highways England, advising them on how to build capability in behavioural change and social research. She is taking a break from her role as Head of Social and Behavioural Research at the Department for Transport (DfT) UK and joint Head of Profession for Social Researchers in DfT. In DfT she led a team of professional social and behavioural researchers with multidisciplinary backgrounds to
a) deliver high quality, timely, social and behavioural research evidence across DfTs top priority areas such as sustainability, safety, transport and health, carbon reduction, accessibility, social and distributional impacts to understand people and organisations and
b) provide expert advice and guidance relating to a wide range of transport issues on behavioural insights, socio-demographic trends and implications for mobility and accessibility; monitoring and evaluation (what works?) and the social and behavioural implications of new technologies on transport demand and supply.
With over 25 years' experience in the field of transport research she is an acknowledged expert in road user safety research and injury prevention and has actively contributed to several OECD road user safety expert groups and has latterly developed expertise across broader social and behavioural aspects of travel and mobility. She is an experienced researcher applying a range of methodologies to large scale, complex and challenging projects and programmes. Throughout her career she has extensive experience in conducting and commissioning research and is an experienced programme and project manager. As a senior manager she has built up a successful and effective specialist team and increased capacity and capability across DfT in the application of behavioural insights to public policy i.e. more people-centred approaches.
- Ben Plowden, Director of Strategy and Planning, Surface Transport at TfL
Ben's responsibilities include providing the overall strategic direction for Surface Transport; joint lead on the annual Business Plan and Budget; road network prioritisation; allocation of transport capital funding to London's boroughs; and delivery of cycling, walking, public realm, road safety, freight, bus priority and Travel Demand Management.
Ben has extensive experience of the workings of both national and local government, both from the "outside" as an environmental campaigner and from the "inside" as a senior director at Transport for London (TfL). He is a non-executive director of the Transport Systems Catapult.
Ben has been at TfL since 2002, during which time he has held a number of senior roles, including Managing Director of Communications.
Before joining TfL, Ben was one of the country's leading environmental campaigners, ending up as the first paid Director of the Pedestrians Association, which he re-launched as Living Streets in 2000 to campaign for improved public spaces.
- Sue Sharland is a Non-Executive Director/Trustee for a number of private, public and not for profit organisations in the transport, planning, marine, water and environment sectors.
From 2001 to 2013, she was Chief Executive of TRL Limited and Transport Research Foundation. TRL provides independent world-class research, consultancy, testing and software for all aspects of transport, in the UK and internationally. TRL was established in 1933 as part of Government, and became a private company, owned by the Transport Research Foundation in 1996.
Sue was previously a senior manager within AEA Technology plc, where she led a number of areas including consultancy, risk management and engineering software. She started her career as a mathematical modeller, working in waste management and corrosion of metals.
Sue is a Fellow of the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation (CIHT), and currently chairs the Diversity & Inclusion Panel and the Technology & Innovation Panel. She was President of CIHT from June 2015 to June 2016.
- Nigel Titchener-Hooker, Executive Dean of the UCL Faculty of Engineering Sciences.
Nigel leads the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacture in Emergent Macromolecular Therapies and was the past lead of the UCL Innovative Manufacturing Research Centre (IMRC) in Bioprocessing programme. This involves a multidisciplinary group from over a dozen departments to research new methods to speed the development of efficient and robust processes for the manufacture of the next generations of macromolecular drugs. The work brings together researchers from Structural and Molecular Biology (Professor John Ward), and within the Faculty of Engineering Science significant collaborations exist with Computer Science (Professor Tony Hunter), Chemical Engineering (Dr. Eva Sorenson and Dr. Lazaros Papageorgiou). Internally Dr. Dan Bracewell, Dr. Nicolas Szita, Dr. Yuhong Zhou, Dr. Eli Keshavarz-Moore and Professor Mike Hoare help Nigel in the management of the IMRC consortium that comprises 15 leading national and international companies.
A major focus of Nigel's work is the creation of whole bioprocess models and the use of these to gain process insights and understanding. Here he works with Dr. Yuhong Zhou in the creation of graphical user interfaces to visualise better process trade offs. With Dr. Suzanne Farid, Nigel has pioneered studies of decisional tools addressing the interface between bioprocessing and business issues.
Nigel has held consultancies with a broad range of international companies and serves on the editorial board of key peer-reviewed journals. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2008 in recognition of his pioneering work on biopharmaceuticals manufacturing. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Chemical Engineers and was awarded the Donal Medal for his contributions to Biochemical Engineering in 2013. He is Chair of the Board of the prestigious ACS-supported Recovery of Biological Products conference series.
- Nick Tyler, Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering
Professor Tyler, Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at UCL, was educated at the Royal College of Music, the Polytechnic of Central London (now the University of Westminster) and UCL. He worked as Operations Manager at Unichem Ltd (1984-85) before joining UCL in 1987, holding appointments as Research Assistant, Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader at UCL in the period 1987 to 2002, when he was appointed to a professorship. Professor Tyler has been Head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (renamed Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering in 2007). He is also Director of UCL CRUCIBLE Centre and UCL Accessibility Research Group. Currently he directs the Centre for Transport Studies.
A Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Professor Tyler's notable appointments outside UCL include: Member of EPSRC Engineering Programme Strategic Advisory Team 2006; Member of the Chief Scientific Adviser's review team for the Department for Transport 2009; Member of the Advisory Panel for Infrastructure UK 2010; Adviser to Chinese Government Ministry of Science and Technology on Low carbon transport (2010). He was appointed CBE for Services to Technology in the 2011 New Year's Honours list.