Georgina SantosView profile
Associate Professor
Professor Georgina Santos is a Reader in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University, where she has been employed since 2010, progressing from University Lecturer to Senior Lecturer and then to Reader in 2021. She previously held academic positions at the University of Oxford (2004-2010) and the University of Cambridge (1997-2004), where she was a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow and Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College. Her educational background includes: PhD in Economics from Downing College, University of Cambridge MSc in Environmental and Resource Economics from University College London Licenciate in Economics from Universidad Nacional del Sur, Argentina Professor Santos is an economist specializing in environmental and transport economics and public policy. Her research has focused on the internalisation of transport externalities, with particular emphasis on air pollution, climate change, and traffic congestion. She has conducted extensive research on environmental taxes for air and road transport, delays at airports, traffic congestion on roads, and more recently on shared mobility and Mobility as a Service. Her work also explores low carbon vehicle/fuel technologies, consumers' choice and modal split, and she has increasingly focused on development economics and gender studies, particularly examining gender and academic progression in the UK. Her interdisciplinary approach connects economics with environmental science, urban planning, and public policy to address critical sustainability challenges. Analysis of her recent publications (2020-2024) reveals a strong focus on decarbonizing transport through electrification, examining the policy frameworks needed to support this transition. Her work spans multiple dimensions of sustainable mobility, including electric vehicle adoption, charging infrastructure, workplace parking levies for congestion management, and the environmental impacts of work-from-home arrangements. She has maintained a consistent interest in road pricing mechanisms and their distributional effects while expanding into gender studies within academia, as evidenced by her 2019 publication on gender and academic rank in the UK. Professor Santos has held significant editorial positions, serving as Editor-in-Chief of Research in Transportation Economics (2013-2018) and currently serving on the editorial boards of Transport Policy, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Sustainability, Future Transportation, Highlights of Sustainability, and Challenges. She chairs the World Conference on Transport Research Society's Topic Area E: Transport Economics and Finance and co-chairs their Special Interest Group on Pricing and Regulation. Throughout her career, Professor Santos has successfully secured research funding from prestigious sources including the Global Challenges Research Fund, European Commission, European Regional Development Fund, British Academy, Shell, ESRC, and the UK Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions. She has taught undergraduate and graduate students at Cambridge, Oxford, and Cardiff, supervising numerous dissertations. Her teaching focuses on transport, environmental and development economics with public policy applications, and both quantitative and qualitative research methods. At Cardiff University, she has been nominated multiple times for the 'Enriching Student Life Award' (2014-15, 2015-16, 2016-17, 2020-21, 2023-24), reflecting her commitment to student engagement and development. Professor Santos actively contributes to policy development, having served on the North Wales Transport Commission from 2022-2023. She previously served on the Advisory Board of the International Encyclopedia of Transportation (2017-2021) and the Congestion Pricing Committee and Transportation Economics Committee of the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies in the US (2005-2016 and 2005-2013, respectively).
