Dr Richard Edgar Hodgett

Dr Richard Edgar Hodgett

Profile

Richard started his career as an engineer, gaining experience working for an automotive design company in Belgrade and an industrial design company in Gothenburg. He was awarded with a PhD in Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials from Newcastle University where he worked on improving decision-making in whole process design. After his PhD, Richard worked as a Research Associate for Newcastle University where he developed several software-based tools for decision-making. Following this he worked as an Innovation Specialist for Britest Limited (a not for profit SME), developing tools for facilitating whole process understanding.
In 2014, Richard joined the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in Business Analytics and Decision Science where he helped to establish and develop the MSc in Business Analytics and Decision Sciences (BADS). Richard was the program director for MSc BADS between 2017-2021, became an Associate Professor in 2018 and was the Director of Student Education for the Management department between 2020-2022. Richard became MBA director in 2023 and will lead, direct and develop the globally-recognised MBA portfolio at LUBS.

Responsibilities

  • MBA Director

Research interests

Richard is a multi-disciplinary researcher who is interested in applied analytical and decision problems. He is interested in MCDA/MCDM, multi-objective optimisation, methods and techniques for handling uncertainty, predictive modelling and the development of new/innovate analytical methods. He is open to supervising PhD projects in these areas.

Richard has been awarded with £2m+ funding supported by all major research councils (including Innovate UK, ESRC, EPSRC and the Horizon 2020 programme). Currently Richard is supervising one research fellow (EPSRC funded) and three PhD students.

Below are some of the projects Richard has worked on recently:

  • Richard was the academic supervisor for an InnovateUK/ESRC funded KTP in collaboration with a successful music label. The aim of the project was to develop a system utilising machine learning, artificial intelligence and decision science methodologies to support and enhance the identification of new musical talent and maximise the profitability of the talent identification process. Although dissemination work is ongoing the funding finished in early 2020.
  • Richard was the Leeds PI on a 2year EU funded (€0.5million) project titled Setting the framework for the enhanced impact of SPIRE projects. He worked alongside Prof. Alan Pearman, Dr. Vedran Lesic and a number of industrial partners including Britest Ltd, INEOS, A.Spire, Iris and CRIT. The project finished in September 2019 with the following reviewer feedback: the “project has delivered exceptional results with significant immediate or potential impact”.
  • Richard was the academic supervisor for an InnovateUK funded KTP project with Clipper Logistics. The aim of the project was to develop and deploy models, incorporating predictive analytics techniques, that will significantly improve the processing efficiency and reduce the costs involved in handling product returns arising from fast fashion e-commerce transactions.

Qualifications

  • PhD in Multi-criteria decision-making in whole process design, Newcastle University
  • Newcastle Teaching Award, Newcastle University
  • MEng in Product Design and Development, Queens University Belfast

Professional memberships

  • OR Society
  • International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making
  • IEEE

Student education

Richard specialises in teaching analytics and decision-making approaches. Since joining Leeds, Richard has fully designed and developed three new masters level modules (LUBS5308, LUBS5309 & LUBS5578) and one new undergraduate module (LUBS2920). He has passed most of these modules onto other fantastic colleagues.

Richard enjoys teaching practical skills and supports the use of blended and flipped learning, teaching the majority of his practicals in computer clusters where the students learn from Richard, the course materials and fellow students.

Richard teaches many topic areas including data pre-processing, dealing with missing data, hierarchical and non-hierarchical clustering, multi-criteria decision analysis, network graphing and visualisation, linear optimisation, goal programming, genetic algorithms, swarm based optimisation methods, variable reduction techniques, time series analysis and forecasting (exponential smoothing, ARIMA etc.), neural networks / deep learning, naive Bayes classification, linear/logistic regression, text analysis, simulations, big data systems (Hadoop, Spark etc.), big data platforms (Azure, AWS etc.), databases, SQL and APIs.

Richard has also designed and delivered many bespoke executive education courses for groups in industry. He regularly teaches courses on analytical content for the Consumer Data Research Centre and has taught decision-making modules for the United Nations. He has spoken at many external events including the Leeds Digital Festival and Ideas in Practice events

Research groups and institutes

  • Centre for Decision Research

Current postgraduate researchers