Piet Gerrits

Thesis title

Understanding Settlement and Population Dynamics using Multi-Source Data Integration: A spatiotemporal comparative analysis of Population Dynamics in Turkey and Bulgaria

Interests

Interested in Geospatial Data Science and Data Visualisation worked on a wide range of projects in Digital Humanities, Archaeology and Humanitarian fields.

Bio

Piet is an interdisciplinary researcher and PhD candidate at the University of Glasgow. He completed his undergraduate at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, and his Master at Koç University in Istanbul in Archaeology with a specialisation in GIS and Remote Sensing. Piet has worked on a wide range of projects in Digital Humanities, Archaeology, and Humanitarian fields. Prior to joining the team in Glasgow, Piet worked as a GIS Specialist for the ERC-funded UrbanOccupationsOETR Project (Grant agreement ID: 679097). His research interests include Geospatial Data Science, Data Visualisation, and Machine Learning. His collaborative work has been published in IEEE Access, PLOS ONE and Nature Scientific Reports and presented at a variety of academic conferences, such as GIScience, ACM SIGSpatial, ECTQG, UGI-IGU, ECTQG and the UCGIS Symposium.

Research

Piet’s PhD research titled ‘Understanding Settlement and Population Dynamics using Multi-Source Data Integration: A spatiotemporal comparative analysis of Population Dynamics in Turkey and Bulgaria’ examines how changes in settlement patterns and land use changes have impacted population dynamics during the 20th century. The research takes a data driven analysis combining historical archival records, historical topographic maps, and satellite imagery from the 20th century. Incorporating spatial modelling and geo-simulation methods, the research aims to look at the spatiotemporal impacts of population growth on settlement patterns in the transnational border area of Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey.

Piet also works as a part-time Research Software Engineer in the GDSG team and part-time Research Assistant in the MAHSA Project at the University of Cambridge. In his spare time, he is a Data Science volunteer at Mapaction, a humanitarian mapping NGO.