MARIO COOLS

Mario Cools (Lier, 1982) holds a master's degree in applied economics, with a major in quantitative business economics, a minor in operations research (University of Antwerp, 2004) and a master's degree in applied statistics (Hasselt University, 2005). After obtaining his statistics degree, he started working as a PhD candidate at the Transportation Research Institute of Hasselt University, where he obtained his PhD in transportation sciences in 2009. After continuing his post-doctoral research, Mario Cools was granted a post-doctoral fellowship from the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) in 2010. Consequently, he worked at the Hogeschool-Universiteit Brussel (HUB) as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Economics and Management and 10% as an assistant professor in the Faculty of Business Economics of Hasselt University.
 
Currently, Mario Cools is appointed as a full-time (full) professor at the Faculty of Applied Sciences of the University of Liège, where he is in charge of the research domain 'diagnosis and analysis of transport and its externalities' of the research unit LEMA. LEMA is a research group attached to the Urban & Environmental Engineering (UEE) research unit at the University of Liège. It develops its research in the domains of (i) architectural and urban modelling with the goal of improving the sustainability of the built environment, (ii) urban planning and urban forms and (iii) diagnosis and analysis of transport and its externalities.

Mario Cools is the author and co-author of different scientific publications in research domains such as travel behaviour, transport policy and activity-based travel demand models. In the past, he was involved with several research projects in this domain. Topics of these include travel behaviour surveys, activity-diary data collection, survey methodology, profile and accident analysis of motor- and moped cyclists, bicycle trips and related indicators, multimodal transportation choices, household mobility and energy consumption, traffic models, activity-based models, uncertainty analysis, transport policy, congestion-averse transport planning.

Mario Cools has been active as a visiting professor and guest lecturer at a variety of international research institutions, including ENPC (ParisTech), the University of Toronto, the University of Danang, the University of Brasilia (UnB), and the Central University of Ecuador (UCE). At a national level, he is currently a visiting research fellow at the Department of Mathematics, Education, Econometrics and Statistics (MEES) of the KUL Campus Brussels and a guest professor in the Business Economics Faculty of Hasselt University.