Grant Tregonning

Research Fellow in Geospatial Data Science

grant dot tregonning at warwick dot ac dot uk

R2.11, Ramphal Building, School of Cross-Faculty Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL

Biography

Grant joined the Institute for Global Sustainable Development in May 2020 as a research fellow. He began his PhD at Newcastle University in 2016, where he also worked as a teaching assistant and co-manager of the GIS-Helpdesk. Grant has a BSc in Environmental Science and an MSc in Integrated Management of Freshwater Environments both from Queen Mary University of London.

Grant is a geospatial scientist who is interested in climate change, sustainability, inequalities and citizen science. He mainly uses geospatial analytical methods to understand issues associated with urban sustainability and liveability. His NERC funded PhD research project adopted multi-objective optimisation techniques to determine the next set of spatially optimised sustainable housing development plans for major cities within the UK. Grant’s research was underpinned by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and utilised nationally available datasets to identify various trade-offs and synergies between key sustainability and climate related objectives. In 2018, Grant was presented with the RICS World Built Environment Forum ‘Rising Star’ award for his doctoral research. The following year, Grant was a recipient of the Marie Curie Horizon-2020 Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) programme and became a visiting research fellow at the University of Auckland. During this period, Grant was able to broaden his international network and work within a team of cloud-computing and multi-objective optimisation specialists to further improve and develop his research.

Between 2016 and 2020 Grant was a member of the International Advisory Board for the Data Risk and Environmental Analytical Methods CDT programme and is currently a member of the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee, the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management and the Worshipful Company of Water Conservators. Grant has played an active role within various UK-based social-enterprise projects, such as the Brilliant Club and the Nuffield Foundation, that aim to reduce the access gap for underrepresented and marginalised communities.

At Warwick, Grant continues to develop his research on urban liveability and sustainability. Due to his interdisciplinary background in environmental science, urban science, fluvial science and geographic information systems, Grant is currently working on a number of IGSD projects including the Data and Displacement, Creating Interfaces and Slum Mapping initiatives.

Data and Displacement: Assesses the data-based humanitarian targeting of assistance to internally displaced persons (IDPs) in two contexts that are characterised by conflict and high levels of displacement: northern Nigeria and South Sudan. Funder: AHRC and DFID under the Collaborative Humanitarian Protection Programme. Partners: University of Ibadan, University of Juba, International Organisation for Migration, awarded £390,000 WP1: Geospatial analysis of coverage and efficiency of datasets, focusing on data visualisation and spatial exclusions at Institute for Global Sustainable Development

Creating Interfaces: Building capacity for integrated governance at the food-water-energy-nexus in cities on the water. European Institute for Energy Research (EIFER), Nicolaus Copernicus University, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR), Pracownia Zrownowazonego Rozwoju (PZR), University of Delaware, Danube Delta National Institute for Research and Development (DDNI), 52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software, Simbiotica, University of Warwick, Plantagon International, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, awarded £1.6m. WP4: Enhancing of the visibility of the FWE nexus at Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies and Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick (UK).

NIHR Global Health Unit on Improving Health in Slums at the University of Warwick, PI Richard Lilford/Warwick Medical School, £5.6m; Co-I Professor Porto de Albuquerque, managed budget £600K). National Institute for Health Research, awarded Jun 2017-Mar 2021. WP1: Geo-spatial mapping of health services in slums and working with partners in Bangladesh, Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan. Press release, Global Health Unit summary. Role: Research Assistant.

Tregonning, G., Barr, S., Dawson, R.,Ranjan, R. (2019). A multi-objective spatial optimization framework for sustainable urban development. Presented at the International Conference on Natural Hazards and infrastructure, Chania, Greece. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3968850