My name is Jorge Ubirajara Pedreira Junior and I’m a permanent (tenured) Assistant Professor in the Department of Transportation Engineering and Geodesy at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), Brazil. I hold a PhD in Transportation Engineering from the University of São Paulo (USP), where I studied the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on travel behavior through longitudinal tracking of individuals’ mobility choices over time. I’m also the deputy leader of the CETRAMA research group and have experience in consulting and technical cooperation with both the public and private sectors, helping bridge the gap between research and practice.

My research agenda covers topics such as travel behavior, urban accessibility, health-related mobility, humanitarian logistics, and transport resilience to climate hazards. I often approach these questions with a data-driven perspective, aiming to produce evidence that can support planning and operational decisions. For that purpose, I usually draw on methods from Statistical Modeling, Machine Learning, Geostatistics, Network Science, Mathematical Optimization, and Simulation Modeling. I’m also engaged in Data Science education, with a focus on teaching applied statistics with R (by the way, I’m writing a book in Portuguese on the topic to provide a structured reference for my classes in Brazil 👨🏻‍🏫).

A commitment to open-source tooling and reproducible workflows is a central part of my work. I developed and maintain {cnefetools} (available on CRAN), an R package that supports access to Brazilian Census address data as well as land-use indices production, spatial aggregation, and interpolation of Census variables. I’m also developing {tripdistmodels}, which implements growth factor and gravity formulations for trip distribution modeling, {geohazards} for extracting global data related to climate risk, susceptibility, and vulnerability and {susflows}, for generating hospital admission flows in Brazil’s public health system, the Sistema Único de Saúde, SUS.