Professor Rachel Franklin

Strategic advice team lead

Rachel Franklin leads Smart Data Research UK‘s strategic advice team team. She is also an observing member of the Smart Data Research UK programme board.

Rachel is Professor of Geographical Analysis in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University. She is also Group Leader for Liveability in the Science of Cities and Regions Programme at the Alan Turing Institute. 

Professor Franklin’s research interests are in the sources and impacts of demographic change as it occurs at multiple spatial scales. She is also investigating novel forms of data and analysis to identify, characterise, and address these changes.  

Rachel works at the regional and local scales to understand how societal and technological innovations can be implemented equitably. She is exploring how best to characterise or measure the populations and features of places. She is also looking at how location and scale are related to spatial inequalities and demographic change. Her research also considers how migration, especially internal, affects demographic composition.  

Rachel Franklin is especially interested in how we use data and statistics to understand what sorts of people are located where. She is interested how this changes over time, and what this means for our understanding of spatial inequality. 

The Smart Data Research UK strategic advice team also includes Professor Simeon Yates and Dr Elena Musi at the University of Liverpool, Dr Omar Guerrero at the Alan Turing Institute, and Dr Seth Spielman as an international partner at Microsoft in the United States. Plus, two early-career researchers, Jeanette D’Arcy from the University of Liverpool and Jessica Crosby from Newcastle University.