Professor Rachel Franklin is co-director of Imago, our Data Service for Imagery. She is Executive Director of the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University and Visiting Professor in the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University.

Prior to Harvard and Newcastle, Rachel was at Brown University, the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and the U.S. Census Bureau. She is a faculty affiliate in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University and a visiting professor at the Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) in Italy.

Rachel likes new data, old data, big data, and little data, especially when it’s spatial and especially when it’s deployed in response to new, old, big, and small societal challenges.

Her primary research focus is on spatial inequality, especially the interplay between spatial analytics and demographic change, and she has published in many of the top journals in the field.

Rachel also highly values disciplinary community: she is the current editor of Geographical Analysis and cross-disciplinary editor for the Annals of the AAG. For academic fun, she co-hosts the GlaD (Geography, Life and Data) podcast with Levi Wolf and fellow Imago co-director Dani Arribas-Bel.

Meet our other Smart Data Research UK data services teams.