Joao Fonseca Bigotte is an assistant professor at the University of Coimbra and a researcher at CITTA – Research Centre for Territory, Transport, and Environment. Currently, he acts as Coordinator of the new master course on City Management and Transport Engineering at the University of Coimbra, and Coordinator of the Working Group on Transport System of the Regional Spatial Planning Program of the Centro Region (Portugal).
Joao holds a degree in Civil Engineering (2003) and a PhD in Spatial Planning and Transportation (2009) from the University of Coimbra. In the past 15 years, Joao has successfully moved from academia to the industry (in 2009, to lead the innovation activities of a corporate group with businesses in engineering, construction, and real estate) and back to academia (in 2015-16, as an invited professor of Innovation and Technological Change within the scope of the MIT-Portugal Program). He has been a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario) and at MIT (Cambridge, Massachusetts).
Joao’s research addresses innovation, transport planning, and spatial planning. In particular, he has focused on the integration of planning decisions about facility location and transport network design, the diffusion and acceptance of new mobility solutions (shared micromobility, and mobility-as-a-service), and proximity-centered accessibility under the 15-minute city planning framework.
He is very much interested in creating livable cities, in new mobility solutions and in fostering university-industry collaborations.