Postdoctoral Researchers Sarah Sanchez and Hamish Gibbs Bridge the Gap Between Big Data and Local Planning

                  Northeastern postdoctoral researchers Sarah Sanchez and Hamish Gibbs are helping to put powerful community planning tools in the hands of the people who need them most. Both are members of Professor Esteban Moro‘s Social Urban Networks Lab (SUNLab) within Northeastern’s Network Science Institute, where they contributed to the development of Mobility Data for Communities (MD4C) — a new platform that uses aggregated, anonymized cellphone location data to help community planners, nonprofits, and municipalities better understand who visits their neighborhoods, where those visitors come from, and how they move through local spaces. 

                 Sanchez emphasized that while census data captures who lives in an area, mobility data fills a critical gap by revealing where people travel for everyday activities like shopping, dining, and recreation. Gibbs highlighted a key equity dimension of the work; this type of data has historically been expensive, technically complex, and locked behind privacy agreements, placing it out of reach for the community organizations that can benefit the most from it. Their contributions reflect the team’s broader mission to “give back” the data that communities themselves generate, so that residents and local leaders can make more informed decisions about growth, services, and infrastructure.  

Read more about their work in this article from Northeastern Global News.