NECTAR chair: Maria Attard
Maria Attard is a Full Professor of Transport Geography at the University of Malta. She is also the Director of the Institute for Climate Change and Sustainable Development. She has published in the fields of urban transport and sustainable mobility, public transport and active travel. She was a consultant for Malta’s Government between 2002 and 2010 and implemented several projects in and around Valletta, the islands’ capital. She holds editorial positions in a number of journals and a book series, and supports the editorial boards of many journals. She has been Cluster 2 Co-Chair in NECTAR since joining in 2011.
Website: https://www.um.edu.mt/profile/mariaattard
NECTAR vice-chair: Karst Geurs
Karst Geurs is Full Professor of Transport Planning at Department of Civil Engineering and Mangement, University of Twente, the Netherlands. His research focuses on accessibility analysis and modeling, land-use and transport interactions, transport policy evaluation and sustainable transport. He has been active in NECTAR since 2009 and is NECTAR chair since 2014. He is also the NECTAR book series editor published by Edward Elgar.
Website: https://people.utwente.nl/k.t.geurs
NECTAR vice-chair: Benjamin Büttner
Benjamin Büttner is the deputy head of the Chair of Urban Structure and Transport Planning at the Technical University of Munich, where he leads the TUM Accessibility Planning Research Group. His research focuses on developing accessibility instruments that support informed and collaborative decision-making processes emphasising equity, sustainability, resilience and livability by integrating intermodal accessibility and proximity-centered approaches through active mobility.
He has been a very active co-chair of the NECTAR Accessibility cluster since 2018. He is the head of the EIT Urban Mobility ‘Doctoral Training Network’ since 2019, in which more than 100 international and interdisciplinary PhD students are working together. He is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Urban Mobility. He serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Transport Geography as well as Sustainable Futures and was recently appointed Area Editor for Accessibility in Networks and Spatial Economics.
Benjamin is actively involved in international initiatives and has led European research projects, including the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT), JPI Urban Europe, and HORIZON Europe collaborations. He has also organized academic conferences such as mobil.TUM 2012, mobil.TUM 2024 and will organize the NECTAR 2026 conference.
Website: https://www.mos.ed.tum.de/en/sv/about-us/team/dr-ing-benjamin-buettner/
NECTAR treasurer: Felix Pot
Felix Pot works as Postdoctoral Researcher in Transport Geography at the University of Groningen. During his PhD at the same university, he studied perceptions of accessibility in rural areas. After being a visiting researcher at the Institute for Transport Studies at the University of Leeds, he returned to Groningen. Currently, his research focuses more broadly on the role of accessibility in explaining and evaluating regional socio-economic disparities.
Website: https://www.rug.nl/staff/f.j.pot/
NECTAR secretary: Daniela Arias Molinares
Daniela Arias Molinares has a PhD in Geography from Complutense of Madrid. She is an Urban Planner with an Urban Transport Master Degree from Caracas, and is interested in sustainable mobility, with an emphasis on active mobility. Her most recent work analysed micromobility spatiotemporal patterns using GPS data and explored the role of these services in a future Mobility as a Service (MaaS) offer. Now, she is currently starting a 3-year-postdoc position and being part of the coordination team for the DREAMS project (Driving Equitable and Accessible 15 Minute Neighbourhood Transformations) at University of Twente.
NECTAR web manager: Anastasia Soukhov
Anastasia Soukhov is a PhD Candidate in Transport Geography at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada with completed research stays at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She is developing accessibility methods, compatible sustainability and equity frameworks, and is also a strong proponent of open and reproducible science. She holds both a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering (Transportation), with a minor in Geographical Information Systems. Anastasia also works as a researcher for the Mobilizing Justice partnership, a project addressing transportation inequities in Canadian cities through research and knowledge mobilization.