AIPN Member in the Spotlight - Professor Ben Beck
Name: Professor Ben Beck
Role: Head of Healthy Active Cities
Organisation: Monash University
I’m Ben Beck, a Professor at Monash University and I am Head of Healthy Active Cities. My work sits across transport, public health, safety, behaviour and systems science, with a particular focus on how we create cities that make healthy, active and sustainable ways of getting around possible for all.
Mobility is a big part of what we work on, but we’re really interested in cities as complex systems; how transport interacts with health, the built environment, equity, policy, institutions and the way people experience and use places.
How did you get into Injury Prevention?
I came into the field through engineering. I majored in biomechanics as an undergraduate, which got me interested in injury and how the human body responds to forces, and that eventually led me into a road safety PhD with Lynne Bilston and Julie Brown.
My work has broadened quite a bit since then. I’m now interested in the much bigger question of how we change the systems that shape the way people move around our cities. But safety is still right at the core of that – not just from the perspective of trying to prevent people from being killed or injured, but also because perceptions of safety fundamentally shape travel behaviour. If people don’t feel safe walking or riding somewhere, it dramatically constrains whether active mobility is a realistic choice in the first place.
What are you working on at the moment?
Lots of different things, but they’re really connected by one common question: how do we understand, predict and change the systems that shape mobility, health and people’s experience of cities?
Through Healthy Active Cities, we bring together transport, public health, behavioural science, engineering, data science and implementation science to tackle that from lots of different angles.
Some of our work is about developing completely new ways of understanding people's experiences of cities. For example, we’re using virtual reality to develop and validate physiological and biometric measures of people’s stress and emotional responses, so we can better identify where and when people feel unsafe. We’re also using it to systematically test how different street environments and design features influence people’s perceptions of safety, comfort and willingness to walk or ride.
We also have some major gaps in the way we capture injuries involving people walking, cycling and using micromobility. A lot of these injuries simply aren’t well represented in our existing data systems, so we’re trialling new ways of collecting information from people who present to emergency departments. The aim is to get a much better picture of the true scale of the problem, but also of how these crashes happen, where they happen and the factors that contribute to them.
Another major area is transforming the way we model mobility and the impacts of transport investment. We’re developing approaches that can predict which interventions are most likely to increase active travel and then estimate the wider consequences: for health, safety, equity and emissions. Ultimately, it’s about moving beyond describing what has already happened and giving governments much better tools to prioritise what they should do next.
And then there’s the challenge of actually making change happen. A longstanding part of our work is co-designing interventions with communities and organisations, evaluating major real-world changes through longitudinal natural experiments, and understanding the institutional side of implementation , such as the governance, organisational structures, behaviours, relationships and decision-making processes that determine whether good ideas are adopted, implemented well and sustained.
That systems piece is really important to us. It’s not enough to know that an intervention can work in isolation. We also need to understand the conditions that allow change to happen at scale, how different parts of the system interact, and what needs to change around an intervention for its effects to last.
If you could host a dinner on injury prevention, who would be at your table?
I think I’d invite the late Donella (“Dana”) Meadows. She was a systems scientist, and she spent her career thinking about how complex systems behave and, importantly, where the real leverage points for changing them might be.
What I find fascinating about her work is the idea that we spend an enormous amount of effort tweaking individual parts of systems, when the much bigger opportunities can lie in changing things like rules, goals, power and the assumptions that underpin the system in the first place.
For me, that’s what systems change really means. It’s the difference between asking, “What single intervention should we introduce?” and asking much bigger questions about why the system keeps producing the outcomes it does. How are decisions made? What gets funded? Who has influence? What are organisations actually trying to optimise for? And what assumptions about transport, safety, health or cities are built into those decisions?
That feels incredibly relevant to injury prevention, and to mobility and cities more broadly. We’re very good at studying individual interventions, but much of the challenge is understanding how all the pieces fit together and how you create change that lasts.
What might we not know about you?
I take coffee to a completely unnecessary level of scientific experimentation.
Dose, grind size, water temperature, extraction time, water chemistry - there are an embarrassing number of variables involved in what should really just be making a cup of coffee.
What/how can people connect with you on?
Anything that sits somewhere in the messy intersection between transport, health, safety, cities and systems change.
I particularly love working with people from completely different disciplines who look at the same problem in a way I hadn't considered; whether that's transport planners, engineers, behavioural scientists, data scientists, implementation researchers, government or communities.
So if you're thinking about active mobility, how we make our streets and cities safer, how we use new kinds of data to make better decisions, or how we get good ideas into the real world, I'd love to hear from you.
Healthy Active Cities: https://www.monash.edu/medicine/sphpm/healthy-active-cities
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