Associate Professor Marcus Foth

Associate Professor Marcus Foth is founder and director of the Urban Informatics Research Lab, and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Design, Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology.

Marcus’s research focuses on the relationships between people, place and technology. He leads a cross-disciplinary team that develops practical approaches to complex urban problems. He adopts human-computer interaction and design methodologies to build engagement around emerging issues facing our cities. Marcus’s recent work has examined:

• Urban planning – new approaches to community participation and engagement
• Environmental sustainability – new strategies for energy monitoring in domestic settings
• Food futures – new ideas to re-think eating, cooking and growing food in the city
• Collaboration and co-working spaces – new aspirations for libraries in the 21st century

Marcus has received over $2.3 million in national competitive grants and industry funding. He was inducted by the planning, design and development site Planetizen to the world’s top 25 leading thinkers and innovators in the field of urban planning and technology.

Marcus has authored and co-authored over 110 publications in journals, edited books, and conference proceedings. He is the editor of the Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics (IGI 2009), co-author of Action Research and New Media (Hampton Press 2009), co-editor of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011), and co-editor of Eat Cook Grow: Mixing Human-Computer and Human-Food Interactions (MIT Press 2013, in press). He was the co-chair of the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme 2009, conference chair of OZCHI 2009 and the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T) 2011.

Marcus has been invited to give presentations at leading research institutions, including MIT, Harvard, Emerson, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, University of Oxford, University of Manchester, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, IT University of Copenhagen, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

Previous Appointments

• 2011: inaugural Australian Business Foundation Research Fellow on Innovation and Cultural Industries, sponsored by the Aurora Foundation
• 2009 – 2011: Smart Futures Fellow, Queensland Government, co-sponsored by National ICT Australia (NICTA)
• 2009 – 2011: QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow
• 2007: Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK
• 2006 – 2008: ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow