Alison J. Heppenstall

Alison Heppenstall is Professor of Geocomputation at the University of Glasgow, appointed jointly to the School of Social and Political Sciences and the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit.^1,2 She co-directs the Urban Big Data Centre and the Systems Science Programme there, and is a Durham University alumna.^2,3

Her work applies AI and machine learning to social and spatial systems, in cities, health, retail and crime.¹ A focus is building urban digital twins with individual-based models, agent-based models and microsimulation, together with uncertainty quantification and data assimilation, to understand how sustainability policies affect populations.¹ She held an ESRC and Alan Turing Institute fellowship on spatial agent-based models, and in 2022 the International Society of Computational Economics gave her a prize for her contribution to social simulation and agent-based modelling.² Her 2025 Durham methods lecture was titled Learning the City: AI-Driven Approaches to Complexity.³

She is an author of Agent-Based Modelling and Geographical Information Systems and the first-named editor of Agent-Based Models of Geographical Systems.