Markus Schläpfer is a principal investigator at FCL where he leads the Urban Complexity group within the Big Data-Informed Urban Design project. He also holds an appointment as adjunct assistant professor at NTU, within the School of Computer Science and Engineering. Moreover, Markus Schläpfer is a visiting researcher at the Santa Fe Institute (USA) and a research affiliate at MIT's Senseable City Lab (USA). He received his PhD in 2010 from ETH Zurich (Switzerland) at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering, and conducted postdoctoral fellowships at both the Santa Fe Institute and at MIT. 

His main research goals are the derivation of quantitative, predictive models for the organisation of cities and its interplay with urban infrastructure networks. He grounds his research on the increasing availability of large-scale data on human activities and applies methods from complexity science to gain a comprehensive view of the urban dynamics. 

His work has been featured worldwide, including the New York Times, Nature, The Atlantic, Quartz, MIT Technology Review, and Spiegel Online. 

His full profile can be accessed here.

Awards

In 2015, Markus Schläpfer and colleagues were awarded with the first prize in the ‘Data for Development’ Challenge, a major research competition in the field of ‘Big Data’ with over 150 participating universities worldwide.