Luis Guillermo Natera Orozco - PhD student at the Department of Network and Data Science - has received the Award for Advanced Doctoral Students for outstanding student research. Congratulations!
Luis' research focuses on the intersection of network science and urban systems. Urban transportation networks, from sidewalks and bicycle paths to streets and rail lines, provide the backbone for movement and socioeconomic life in cities. During his Ph.D., Luis has developed algorithms to improve the connectivity of bicycle infrastructure networks, an approach that outlines novel pathways from car-centric towards sustainable cities by taking advantage of urban data available on a city-wide scale. In a recently published paper, Luis and his collaborators propose a method to quantify the liveability of a city, taking into account the walkability, how easy it is for a person to access a different set of amenities, services, and attractions just by walking in the city. This method also takes into account safety and environmental variables, to provide a node-based measure of life quality for all the intersections in the city.
The university provides incentives for academic excellence and rewards those promising students who, with their work, have shown outstanding academic potential. The CEU Academic Achievement Awards for Advanced Doctoral Students are awarded to students who have completed a significant portion of research that serves as the basis of the dissertation and for scholarly presentation of tangible results that directly stem from the research (a draft chapter, a paper).