By discipline, Martin Dijst is urban geographer and in 2009 appointed as full professor of Urban Development and Spatial Mobility at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. December 1, 2017, he started his position as director of the department Urban Development and Mobility at LISER, Luxemburg. He is also Affiliate Professor of Urban Development and Mobility at the University of Luxembourg. He has an outstanding track record in international peer-reviewed publications and citations and in large interdisciplinary and intersectoral research projects.

His research is focused on mobility, housing, Information and Communication Technologies, immersive Virtual Reality, climate change, weather conditions, urban metabolism and health. His recent work on health includes analyzing the impact of exposures to environments on health and studies on the meaning of new digitalized sensors, monitoring techniques and self-management methods to stimulate health behaviors.

In the past, he has been PI of the European framework project SELMA on spatial deconcentration of employment and quality of life in European metropolitan areas and of the large Dutch interdisciplinary project CESAR that was focused on climate and environmental change and implications for sustainable accessibility of the Randstad Holland. At Utrecht University, he initiated the interdisciplinary research program Healthy Urban Living, in which researchers from a large variety of medical, behavioural and GIS scientific disciplines jointly studied issues related to healthy urban living. The development of the program was a concerted action by several faculties of Utrecht University and University Medical Center Utrecht, in close collaboration with scientific partner institutes such as RIVM (the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment), NIVEL (the Netherlands Institute for Health Services Research), TNO (the Netherlands Organization of Applied Scientific Research) and PBL (the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency). In addition, stakeholders – such as municipalities and provinces – were intensively involved in this program.

Recently, Martin Dijst received a Marie Curie ITN grant from the European Commission (2021-2025) for the project SURREAL: Systems approach of URban enviRonmEnts and heALth which includes budget for in total 15 PhD students. Also, this project is interdisciplinary as well as intersectoral in nature. In this project, living labs will be organized with professionals and citizens.