Dr. Ned Levine is an urban researcher from Houston, Texas.  He took his B.A. in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and his PhD in Social Psychology & Sociology at the London School of Economics. He has more than 50 years of academic, professional and governmental experience.  He taught at universities in England for 7 years, in Turkey for five years, and for shorter periods in Israel and Sweden as well as in the United States including 15 years in the graduate urban planning program at UCLA in Los Angeles. He also worked at the regional transportation planning agency in Houston for 6 years and developed a metropolitan traffic safety planning program and a Regional Safety Council.

His specialty is GIS and spatial analysis. His research includes such subjects as rural-to-urban migration in Turkey, immigration to London from India and Pakistan, Olympic Games success, growth management and rent control by local governments in California, motor vehicle safety in Honolulu and Houston, gender differences in crime travel in Manchester (UK), hot spot analysis methodology, the role of alcohol-serving businesses in motor vehicle crashes, and several public health applications of GIS methodology.  He has more than 150 publications.  

He developed the first GIS-based motor vehicle crash information system in the U.S. while working in Hawaii and the first GIS-based crash system in Texas while he was at the regional transportation planning agency in Houston. His recent research includes studies of child swimming pool submersions, child homicides, and the role of alcohol in trauma deaths of all types. 

He is the developer of the CrimeStat spatial statistics program, distributed by the National Institute of Justice, which he has been developing since 1997.  In 2000, he received a Vice Presidential National Partnership for Reinventing Government award for the CrimeStat program’s contribution to the U.S. National Spatial Data Infrastructure Demonstration Project.

He will be in Stockholm for six weeks in April and May 2019 on a Fulbright Specialist Award.  While in Stockholm he will co-teach two courses with Professor Vania Ceccato.  One is on spatial data analysis in which he will present the background behind some of the CrimeStat routines and illustrate them with examples.  The other course will be for practitioners.  Again, he will talk about the CrimeStat routines but will focus on those that have direct utility for the analysis of incidents and the tools that practitioners can use (e.g., hot spot analysis of crimes, motor vehicle crashes, disease incidents, or trauma events).

In addition, he hopes to be a resource for researchers at KTH and for the school that he will be associated with (School of Architecture and the Built Environment at KTH). Of course, he hopes to learn a lot more about Stockholm and about its cultural facilities (museums, the opera, the ballet), its environment, and its restaurants (he wants to try the New Nordic Cuisine).

He will be accompanied by his wife, Dr. C. Elizabeth Castro, who was a nutritional biochemist in her professional life and taught and did research at several universities.  She also worked on nutrition science policy for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.  Post-retirement, she pursued community gardening and, in particular, providing organic food for low-income households that have inadequate access to proper nutrition.