Chiara Calastri

Chiara Calastri is a Lecturer in Rail Economics at the Institute for Transport Studies. Her work focuses on the analysis of travel demand, aiming to understand behavioural processes and forecast expected outcomes of policy interventions. Her main areas of expertise are choice modelling and econometrics. She has completed her PhD in 2017 at the Institute for Transport Studies, with a thesis titled "Capturing and modelling complex decision-making in the context of travel, time use and social interactions" (link to thesis:http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/18507/). In her doctoral work, she developed advanced choice models to explain how people interact, form social connections and allocate their time between different activities. She is the winner of the 2017 Eric Pas Dissertation Award (awareded by the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research) which recognises the best doctoral thesis in the area of travel behaviour. She has then been a Post-Doctoral researchers at the Choice Modelling Centre, working on the ERC-funded project “Choices and consumption: modelling long and short term decisions in a changing world” for two years before taking on the role of Lecturer in September 2019.