Professor Nick Tyler CBE

Nick Tyler CBE FREng is the Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering at University College London (UCL) and the Director of the UCL Centre for Transport Studies. Using his musician background, Nick combines highly diverse fields in his research and teaching, from science and engineering through to performing arts and policy. To do this he has created a £50M massive (44,000m3) multiscale multisensorial Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL) to allow him and his team to study the interactions of environments, people and their activities at life-scale, from axons and dendrites to complex urban environments and vehicles.

This approach is a new way of examining how people perceive the environment, using a combination of theoretical neurobiology, neuroscience,
psychology, physiology, engineering and creative arts to inform the synthesis of these results to create new ways of designing safe, accessible, aesthetic, effective and energy-beneficial environments that work for both people and planet. This has resulted in changes in design of buses, trains, stations, streets and pedestrian facilities around the world. Nick’s approach is to work with Capabilities (what people can do) rather than what they can’t, and this has meant a holistic view of the range of Capabilities encountered in the population and how people really encounter the environments they live in. He brings this Capabilities approach to the study of Active Inference, providing empirical evidence for the theoretical generative modelling approaches of Friston et al. whilst bringing a new theoretical core to the generation of a world in which people and environment can thrive together in a mutually beneficial, equitable, safe and healthy way.

He is involved in projects in several countries in Latin America, Japan, China and continental Europe, as well as in London and elsewhere in the UK.

Nick holds a PhD from University College London, where his thesis was on a methodology for the design of high capacity bus systems using artificial intelligence. He was on the winning team for the EC-funded ‘City Design in Latin America 2000: The European City as a Model’ competition, for the design of the transport interchange at Federico Lacroze in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is currently part of the UK involvement in the Chinese Low Carbon Cities Development project. He is a Fellow of the Institution of Ciivil Engineers, a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Highways and Transportation and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He was appointed a CBE in the New Year’s Honours 2011 for services to technology and elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2014.

Nick is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Chartered Institution of Highways and Transportation, and the Royal Society of Arts, was appointed CBE in 2011, and awarded the CIHT Institution Award in 2022.

Image Credit: James Tye.