I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. 
I joined the School in 2003 after 3 years as a software developer, where I focussed 
on maintaining map data integrity and currency for field workers who may only 
have intermittent communication with a central GIS server. As a lecturer at Aston, 
I engage extensively with schools, industry and community groups and have 
received Excellence Awards for my teaching. Much of my research is interdisciplinary, 
involving, for example, collaborations with microbiologists, economists and town planners. My work on a recent secondment as a Senior Researcher at the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission combined  software development and remote sensing experience to generate Web-based landcover validation tools for use by an international community of experts in biodiversity and forestry monitoring.

Having worked for the Birmingham Urban Wildlife Trust as a school leaver, I developed an interest in urban ecology and green corridors which led to a PhD on the spatial pattern and dispersal of plant species within the urban mosaic of remnant and emerging habitat fragments. Patch quality, geometry and isolation were modelled to compare the occupancy of available habitat to that predicted by metapopulation models. The thesis also identified apparent source-sink effects in the woodland herb Melampyrum pratense, within Sutton Park, Birmingham. During this time I also completed an MSc in GIS at the University of Leicester, publishing my dissertation on sub-pixel classification methods for handling 'mixed pixels' in remotely-sensed imagery.  

My first postdoctoral post was on the EU-supported project FLIERS (Fuzzy Land Information from Environmental Remote Sensing) at the University of Leicester, concentrating on:

• generation of verification and training data through vegetation survey, and some novel imagery manipulation and correction.
• creation of a visualisation toolkit to explore the many data layers produced by fuzzy classifications. This toolkit was written in Java, by myself and Jo Wood, and can be downloaded and evaluated HERE.

• UncertWeb: Uncertainty-enabling the 'Model Web'.
• Assessing the effects of real-world uncertainty on conservation planning tools. (in partnership with RMIT, Australia)
• Mapping and modelling of disease: e.g. spatio-temporal clustering of community-associated MRSA in the West Midlands.
• Interoperable exchange of data quality information (via XML schemas such as UncertML) - Web Processing Service approaches to automated interpolation for emergency mapping.
• Carbon/traffic impacts of transporting municipal waste to EfW (Energy from Waste) facilities.

• CS3210: Geographical Information Systems.
• CS3160: Enterprise Application Technology.
• CS2040: Media Science.
• Final year / Masters GIS/ Computer Science / Environmental Science projects.
• EM4010: MSc Quantitative Methods.

• BSc with First Class Honours in Zoology, University of Nottingham, 1991
• MSc with Distinction in Geographical Information Science, University of Leicester, 1995 (ESRI Prize)
• PhD in Spatial Population Ecology, University of Birmingham, 1996

• Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Aston University, 2009

• 2011 - present: Senior Lecturer in Computer Science, Aston University
• 2010 - 2011: Senior Researcher, Global Environmental Monitoring Unit, Joint Research Centre of the European Commission.
• 2004 – 2010: Lecturer, School of Engineering and Applied Science, Aston University
• 2001 – 2003: Senior Software Developer, Tadpole-Cartesia (now ESRI UK)
• 1999 – 2000: Lecturer in GIS, Nottingham University
• 1996-1999: Research Associate, FLIERS, University of Leicester

Fellow of the Higher Education Academy

Phone number: +44 (0)121 204 3560
Email: l.bastin@aston.ac.uk
Room Number: MB2