Mobility Inequality: Taking small business but deliberate steps – inaugural address of Prof Johan W Joubert

Posted on June 24, 2021

Congratulations to Prof Johan W. Joubert, Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, who delivered his inaugural address virtually on 14 June 2021. The title was Mobility Inequality: Taking Small Business but Deliberate Steps. According to Prof Joubert, the talk aimed to consider a different modelling approach that is intuitive and crucial for accurately capturing the state of inequality and accessibility of South Africans. The talk also reflected on the advances made in building decision-support models using agent-based simulation that better captures our mobility challenges. Prof Joubert stated that we build models—imitations of reality—because we want to investigate the intended and unintended consequences of infrastructure interventions before spending our precious but ailing resources on those interventions. He further reiterated that if we do not get it right and cannot answer key mobility questions like 'who gets the benefit of the infrastructure?' or the equally important 'who pays for those benefits?', we cannot claim to be actively addressing the inequality gap.

Prof Johan W. Joubert is an Industrial Engineer with twenty years' experience in optimisation and simulation modelling. He has a particular interest in logistics and the behaviour associated with commercial vehicle movement. He has been a visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zürich) in Switzerland, and the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna, Austria. Prof Joubert was also a Fellow in the Mobility Cultures in Megacities Programme at the Technische Universität München (TUM), sponsored by the Institute for Mobility Research (ifmo), a research facility of the BMW Group. Prof Joubert is also a member of the Centre for Transport Development. Currently, Prof Joubert's primary research interests include freight behaviour modelling, multi-agent transport simulations (specifically MATSim), complex networks as applied to the connectivity of people and firms, and data science and its application to mobility. Prof Joubert holds a C2 rating from the NRF and is the Director of the Institute for City Logistics.

The Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, Prof Sunil Maharaj, welcomed the guests and invited Prof Themba Mosia, Vice-Principal of Student Life, to introduce Prof Joubert and deliver a summary of his career path. According to Prof Mosia, the inaugural lecture was first introduced at the University of Pretoria in 1934. He further mentioned that this is an excellent way to highlight an academic's focus area and share their vast knowledge.

The highlight of Prof Joubert's inaugural lecture was the high attendance of 120 guests, including his close family and industry colleagues who are now internationally based. Sincere congratulations once again to Prof Joubert for his hard-earned success and this milestone achievement!

For Prof Joubert' full inaugural address, please visit the following link: https://youtu.be/oSlsUrLGnMs

- Author Bonolo Mokoka

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