Congrats to our two new Professors!
Published on the 02 February 2026
The School of Civil & Environmental Engineering is delighted to announce the promotion of leading academic staff Kristen Splinter and Meead Saberi to the rank of Professor at UNSW.
‘This is a significant achievement,’ Head of School Professor Nasser Khalili said, ‘and a well-deserved recognition of Kristen and Meead’s outstanding contributions to research, education, leadership, and engagement in their fields.
‘Please join me in congratulating them on this remarkable accomplishment.’
About Kristen
Professor Kristen Splinter is Managing Director of the world-renowned Water Research Laboratory (WRL). She leads a team of academics and engineers at WRL, which is based within the School and is a unique UNSW facility that melds together industry leading and blue sky research.
Kristen's area of expertise is in Coastal Engineering. Her research covers broad topics including storm to inter-annual shoreline change monitoring and modelling; coastal erosion and beach recovery; dune erosion; remote sensing of the coastal environment and machine learning applications.
She is part of a dynamic and growing group within WRLCoastal alongside fellow researchers A/Prof. Mitch Harley and Prof. Ian Turner. Her group currently jointly supervises a number of PhD students, post-docs, Masters and Honours theses as well as international interns.
Kristen is a Chief Investigator for the new UNSW-led Centre of Excellence Our Future Oceans, which has received $35 million from the Australian Research Council to investigate and manage rapidly changing ocean systems. She holds a leadership position as part of the Centre Executive as the EDI Lead and is the Research Lead for RP3.1 Coastal Hazards and Adaptation. The Centre will comprehensively determine how oceans are changing, now and in the future, and develop solutions to promote ocean sustainability and a thriving blue economy. This represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for Australia’s coastal engineering discipline to shape the long-term sustainability and prosperity of coastlines across the globe.
Kristen holds a Bachelors in Civil Engineering from Queen's University (Canada), Masters in Coastal and Oceanographic Engineering from University of Florida (USA); and a PhD in Geological Oceanography as well as a Certificate in Marine Resource Management from Oregon State University (USA). Prior to her position at UNSW Sydney (2011-present) she spent 2 years as a Research Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Coastal Management (Australia).
As a female engineer, Kristen has a strong desire to support and encourage more women into the discipline. She currently advocates for better gender equity within her discipline as a member of the Women in Coastal Geosciences and Engineering (WICGE).
Kristen also serves as Chair of the Engineers Australia NSW Coasts, Oceans, and Ports Engineering Panel (COPEP), and is a Senior Editor for Cambridge Prisms: Coastal Futures. She is also the co-founder of the Comomola seminar series with A/P Giovanni Coco – bringing machine learning and coastal processes research together.
About Meead
Professor Meead Saberi’s research interests and experience cover a wide range of transport engineering areas including traffic flow theory, complex networks, and pedestrian crowd dynamics. His work has advanced both theoretical and applied understanding of transport networks, urban mobility, and sustainable transport systems.
He leads rCITI’s CityX research lab, which focuses on scientific understanding of cities through modelling, simulation, data analytics, and visualization. He is also the co-founder and CEO at footpath.ai, a UNSW spin-off tech start up with an ambitious mission to build next-generation and inclusive maps of the world for people, not just cars.
Meead’s research interests span a broad range of topics in transportation systems analysis, traffic flow theory and network dynamics, large-scale transport network modelling and simulation, complex networks, pedestrian and crowd dynamics, and urban data analytics and visualisation. He has authored nearly 100 peer-reviewed journal papers. He has led and collaborated on numerous externally funded projects worth over $3 million AUD since 2015, supported by the ARC, Transport for NSW, City of Sydney, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Cisco Australia, and others.
Prof Saberi was one of just seven UNSW researchers who received an ARC 2025 Future Fellowship. These Fellowships play a vital role in building Australia’s research and innovation pipeline, enabling the development of new knowledge and innovations that can translate into real-world impact. Meead’s ARC project 'E-VeloCity' - Designing Car-Reduced Urban Street Networks’, will develop models to reallocate street space from cars to walking, e-bikes and other micromobility options. It will provide practical solutions for city planners and policymakers to develop resilient, low-emission urban environments that support Australia’s net-zero goals.
‘This research aims to fundamentally rethink street network design,’ says Meead, ‘by formulating and solving mathematical network models that embed equity, sustainability, and active transport from the outset rather than as an afterthought.’
Meead holds a PhD degree in transportation systems analysis and planning from Northwestern University (USA), a Master's in transportation engineering from Portland State University (USA) and a Bachelor in Civil Engineering from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (Iran).
He serves on the editorial boards of Data Science for Transportation, npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport, and Transportation Letters, and has guest-edited special issues on emerging mobility services and machine learning in transportation research. His scholarship and service have been recognised with multiple awards, including the UNSW Faculty of Engineering Academic Excellence Award (2020) and Leadership Award from the Transportation Research Board’s Traffic Flow Theory and Characteristics Committee (2017).