My name is Rafael Pereira (Rafa for short). I work as a senior researcher at the Institute for Applied Economic Research (Ipea) in Brazil. My research looks broadly at how urban and transport policies shape the spatial organization of cities, human mobility patterns as well as their impacts on social and health inequalities. I am particularly interested in the equity concerns underlying impact assessment of urban and transport planning policies and their effects on inequalities in access to opportunities.

Rafa received the 2017 Lee Schipper Memorial Scholarship from the World Resources Institute (WRI). In 2019, his work received the award for best PhD thesis in transportation by the American Association of Geographers (AAG) and the Young Researcher of the Year Award by the International Transport Forum (ITF/OECD).

Since 2020, Rafa leads the Access to Opportunities Project where he and his team generate annual estimates of accessibility to employment opportunities, education and health services for Brazil’s largest urban areas, and develop new open access computational tools for transport accessibility and emissions modeling.