Egor Kotov, MSc
Profile
»I have an interdisciplinary background that began in economics and environmental management before shifting toward urban spatial science. My early research focused on urban spatial structures and their interaction with transport connectivity. More recently, my work examines human mobility and spatial accessibility using digital trace data – such as mobile phone records – to better understand how daily travel patterns influence spatial inequalities and the spread of diseases. Parallel to my research, I have spent nearly a decade teaching Master's and Bachelor's courses covering urban analytics, urban morphology, geographic information systems, and spatial statistics. I am deeply dedicated to open science and reproducibility, frequently contributing to scientific open-source software – primarily R packages and tools designed to make handling large spatial datasets more accessible to the wider research community.«

Curriculum Vitæ
Research and Professional Experience
Since 2026: Postdoctoral Researcher; TU Dortmund University, Germany
Department of Spatial Planning
2025: Visiting Researcher; GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
GESIS
2022 – 2026: Research Assistant; Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Germany
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography
2018, 2019: Visiting Lecturer; Université Paris-Est Créteil, France
École d’Urbanisme de Paris
2011 – 2013: Consultant; United Nations Development Programme, Russia
UNDP
2011 – 2022: Research Fellow; Higher School of Economics Moscow, Russia
Faculty of Urban and Regional Development
Education
Since 2023: PhD in Political and Social Sciences; Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona, Spain
2009 – 2011: MSc Rural Planning and Environmental Management; University of Aberdeen, UK
2004 – 2009: Specialist (equivalent to BSc + MSc); Higher School of Economics, Russia
Awards and Honours
2022: Best Tutor 2022 HSE Award; Higher School of Economics, Russia
2021: Best Tutor 2021 HSE Award; Higher School of Economics, Russia
Research
At TU Dortmund University, I am working on a DFG-funded project investigating ‘explicit and implicit understandings of spatial weights’. This project is situated at the intersection of spatial statistics, human geography, and spatial planning, and aims to understand how researchers conceptualise formalisations of geographical space in spatial-statistical methods. In addition, my recent research examines human mobility and spatial accessibility using high-resolution mobile phone, GPS, ticketing, and other geospatial data. I study how people move through cities and regions, how transport systems shape access to opportunities, and how mobility patterns relate to urban inequality, public health, and environmental change. Across projects on urban accessibility, socioeconomic mixing, and mobility-driven disease vector spread, I use computational and spatial methods to understand how movement connects people to places, services, and risks. A recurring concern in my work is the gap between planned or potential access and the uneven, realised mobility conditions people experience in everyday life.
Teaching
My teaching experience spans both university courses and specialised workshops, covering a diverse range of topics such as geographic information systems (GISs), computational spatial morphology, R programming for urban analytics, open science, and computational reproducibility. At TU Dortmund University, I will co-teach the module Spatial Analysis and Visualization within the M.Sc. Urban Transformation programme (starting from October 2027).
Previously, I developed and taught the following modules at the Higher School of Economics (HSE University):
- Computational Spatial Morphology (MSc level)
- R Programming for Urban Analytics (MSc level)
- Urban Informatics (BSc level)
- Introduction to Urban Data (MSc level)
Other recently taught workshops and tutorials include:
- Beyond the Chatbox: LLM Coding and Research Agents for Academics (European Population Conference 2026)
- Mobility Flows and Accessibility Using R and Big Open Data (IC2S2 Conference 2025)
- Analysing Massive Open Human Mobility Data Using spanishoddata, DuckDB, and Flowmaps (AGIT Conference 2025)
- Open Science and Reproducibility with Quarto, GitHub, and R (European Doctoral School of Demography)
- Project Workflows for Reproducibility and Replicability Using R (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research)
- Containers for Computational Reproducibility (Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research)
- Introduction to GIS and Urban Data (Université Paris-Est Créteil)
Contact
Egor Kotov, MSc
TU Dortmund University
Department of Spatial Planning
Room GBIII/317
August-Schmidt-Straße 10
44227 Dortmund
Germany
Tel.: +49 (0)231 7556447
Email: egor.kotov@tu-dortmund.de
