TransiT appoints new Head of Data

TransiT, the UK’s national Digital Twinning Hub for Decarbonising Transport, has appointed a new Head of Data to help its research teams manage, protect and deploy growing volumes of transport data, including air, rail, shipping and road freight data.

Barbara Alvarez Solanilla joins the TransiT team from University of Glasgow-based research hub, the Urban Big Data Centre, where she was Senior Research Engineering Manager.

Her role involves building data governance, management and infrastructure at TransiT that allows data to be collected, stored, shared and secured in a way that is efficient, sustainable and safe.

Researchers, policymakers and industry partners need the skills and confidence to use, interrogate and trust the data.

Barbara Alvarez Solanilla

Ms Solanilla said: “I’m really excited to be joining the TransiT team. Environmental and societal sustainability is very important to me, and decarbonising transport is a big part of that.

“Building data literacy across projects like TransiT is essential. Researchers, policymakers and industry partners need the skills and confidence to use, interrogate and trust the data. Without that, the potential of our technology will never be fully realised.”

TransiT is the UK’s largest research hub dedicated to rapidly decarbonising transport using digital twins – digital replicas of the real world. The hub is a collaboration of eight universities and almost 70 industry partners, jointly led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow, and funded by the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council – the main funding body for engineering and physical sciences research in the UK.

The transport system data TransiT is collecting includes road freight data about vehicles and routes, rail timetable data and train performance data, data on air and shipping freight movements, data on carbon emissions from transport and telemetry data – information from vehicle sensors that monitor factors like speed and fuel consumption.

Data provides the essential building blocks needed to create TransiT’s digital twin replica of the UK’s transport system, which will allow different transport decarbonisation scenarios to be tested much more quickly, efficiently and affordably than in the real world.

“Data will allow us to model every granular detail of the UK’s transport system across road, rail, air and maritime and test different decarbonisation strategies,” Ms Solanilla explained. “Without robust, well‑governed and widely shared data, our efforts to decarbonise transport will be slower, riskier and less effective.”

Ms Solanilla, who is originally from Madrid, Spain, has 10 years of experience working in multiple technology and data fields and managing data teams and digital transformation projects in Scotland and abroad.

Before joining the Urban Big Data Centre, she managed a digital analytics team at Scotland’s tourism agency, VisitScotland, were she led the implementation of a Social Listening research infrastructure and integration of GDPR compliance in the use of website technologies.

David Flynn, joint project director of TransiT at the University of Glasgow, said: “We are delighted to welcome Barbara to the TransiT team, providing expert leadership on our data management, governance and infrastructure programmes. Barbara will also support our strategic partnerships with government departments and agencies, with respect to TransiTs support on emergent standards and policies relating to digital twinning for critical national infrastructure.”