Liam Webb

Background

About Liam Webb

My experience began with choosing IT instead of a language in secondary school. This one decision led me to find a passion in IT. I continued this passion into A-levels, where I studied IT and earned a distinction. This achievement, along with my other A-level accomplishments, allowed me to pursue IT further at the degree level. After A-levels, I undertook my next set of studies at USW, completing my degree with first-class honours and a 96% average across all final-year modules. Throughout my studies at USW, I gained valuable skills such as coding in C#, JavaScript, PHP, and SQL, as well as practical skills in GIS development and spatial analysis. I applied these skills in web development to create analytical platforms. Due to my success in my undergraduate course, the GIS professor offered me a fully funded PhD opportunity in GIS under his supervision, which I accepted almost immediately. I wanted to prove myself worthy of my grades, especially as graduating during COVID made degrees seem less trustworthy and important to employers. The PhD scholarship was an unprecedented undertaking that required me to increase my workload and upskill to create an application that would contribute to knowledge and be worthy of the doctorate. The main focus of the PhD was the development of an interactive tool that would enable organisations responsible for planning the provision of public transport to investigate the implications of changes to the existing public transport networks on patterns of accessibility to key services or points of interest (POIs). The skills developed within the PhD are ones that I will carry with me for the rest of my academic and professional career. One of my main skills is coding, with me becoming proficient in R, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and other web development and database languages such as HTML, CSS, and SQL. The application for the PhD consists of all of these languages and displays my level of skill as I use them to leverage data from routing engines, PostgreSQL & PostGIS, and R and Python analytical libraries, and then output these results on a web application utilising charting and mapping JS libraries. In addition to these more traditional skills, I have undertaken presentations across the UK, presenting my research and knowledge at institutions including one of the largest GIS conferences in the UK, GISRUK. As a result of my time spent lecturing students and presenting to peers at conferences, I can present and speak in front of large crowds while ensuring I can still get my point across to an audience.