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Last updated 17th October 2023

Prof. Alexandros Nikitas, a world's top 2% researcher for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022 according to the Stanford/Elsevier ranking list (c-score based), is a Professor in Sustainable Transport Futures for Huddersfield Business School at the University of Huddersfield, UK. He is the Founding Director of the Future Mobility Lab, a new sustainable transport and smart mobility research initiative. He was the Deputy Director of the School’s Behavioural Research Centre and partner of the University’s European Structural and Investment Funds project LCR LEP Supply Chain. He submitted a flagship 4* REF Impact Case for his School in the REF 2021 exercise dealing with Active Transportation in Greece and beyond. Prof. Nikitas is a key figure in the Transport and Logistics Suite degree provision in all study levels.

Prof. Nikitas is the Chair of the Executive Commitee of UTSG (Universities' Transport Study Group) with a tenure between 2022 and 2025. Prof. Nikitas has the great honour to lead the premier transport teaching and research group in the UK and Ireland including 60 academic institution members such as Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Imperial, Loughborough, TCD, Leeds and Southampton to name a few. The correspondence of UTSG is international and connects thousands of transport experts daily through its e-mail list.

Prof. Nikitas is the Associate Editor of the Journal of Transport & Health, the top journal that combines transport with health and wellbeing principles. He is also in the Editorial Boards of three highly reputable Elsevier Journals 'Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice', 'Research in Transportation Business & Management' and 'Case Studies on Transport Policy'. He has also organised and co-organised national and international conferences and conference sessions many times.

Prof. Nikitas has produced more than 120 papers and conference outputs in his career thus far. He is conducting research regarding the societal importance of sustainable mobility and autonomous, connected, shared and digitised transport. He is also the Academic Adviser of the West Midlands Combined Authority in future mobility and travel behaviour change and leads a pioneering research programme on sustainable mobility and mobility hubs funded by Kirklees Council that intends to improve significantly transport provision in the town of Huddersfield.

Earlier in his career Prof. Nikitas was a Senior Researcher in Urban Futures and Transportation for Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden where he worked on FP7 and H2020 transport research initiatives including the 13M€ mega-project OPTICITIES. As part of this role he acted as a research advisor and associate coordinator of the Sino-Swedish programme LIP Shanghai initiated by the Swedish Mistra Urban Futures, which is a premier Swedish Centre for Urban Development.

During his career Prof. Nikitas has also been an invited visiting scholar for Tongji University and Chang’an University in China and EC’s Joint Research Centre, Ispra, Italy. Between 2011 and 2014 he served as a Local Councillor for his hometown Drama, Greece. Now he is a Visiting Professor for Chalmers University of Technology, one of the true Scandinavian academic powerhouses, working on joint papers and projects with the team of the Design & Human Factors Division.

Prof. Nikitas has an MEng in (Civil) Engineering (University of Durham, 2002), an MSc in Transport, Planning and Engineering (Edinburgh Napier University, 2006), an MA in Applied Social Research in Built Environment with Merit (UWE, 2009) and finally a PhD in the area of Transport and Society (UWE, 2010). His PhD Thesis 'Understanding the Attitudes of Older People to Road Pricing' has received two international research excellence awards by prestigious institutions of academia and practice. During September 2016 he was also acknowledged as a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy after completing an in-house PGCHE course with Distinction.