Dear NECTAR friends

We are less than two weeks away from the 14th International NECTAR conference in Madrid, May 31-June 2. The Madrid conference will have over 130 participants and will be an exciting event. The conference will also mark the 25th anniversary of NECTAR and special events will be organized to celebrate this milestone.

In Madrid, we will also award the 2nd NECTAR PhD Award for best recent PhD thesis work in the NECTAR field. The award is established in memory of Professor Piet Rietveld, who chaired NECTAR in the years 2002-2007 and who with his exceptional academic abilities inspired and stimulated many young researchers, PhD students and the NECTAR community in general. Fourteen excellent theses had been nominated by their PhD supervisors, and the PhD Committee, chaired by Professor Erik Verhoef, had a very difficult task selecting the winner. I am pleased to announce here that Cyrille Médard de Chardon from the University of Luxembourg wrote the winning thesis titled “A geographical analysis of bicycle sharing systems”. Cyrille will present his thesis in the closing plenary session of the conference.

Furthermore, I am also happy to announce that at the Madrid conference the new NECTAR cluster 7 on Social and Health Issues will be launched. The social and health-related impacts from transport are diverse and there are many challenges to understand how they affect our social and economic wellbeing. This new cluster will bring together researchers from a variety of scientific disciplines and will surely help to strengthen NECTAR as a multidisciplinary social science network. The aims of the cluster and the cluster co-chairs are presented in this newsletter.

I look forward to seeing many of you in Madrid!

Karst Geurs, NECTAR chair

http://www.civic-project.eu/en/events/14th-nectar-international-conference