Markus Schläpfer

Markus Schläpfer is currently leading the Urban Complexity project at the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore. After receiving his PhD from ETH Zurich in Mechanical Engineering, he conducted postdoctoral fellowships at MIT's Senseable City Lab and at the Santa Fe Institute, USA. His main research goals are the derivation of predictive quantitative models for the spatial organization of cities and its interplay with the optimal layout of urban infrastructure networks such as the energy supply system. To that end, Markus Schläpfer grounds his research on the increasing availability of large-scale data on human activities such as those automatically collected from mobile phone networks. He applies and further develops tools from network theory and complexity science to gain a comprehensive view of the dynamics of various cities worldwide.