Dr Richard Edgar Hodgett

Profile

Dr. Richard Hodgett holds a master's and PhD in engineering. Formerly an Innovation Specialist, he joined Leeds University Business School a decade ago to establish the master's in business analytics and decision sciences. After leading this program, he became the director of student education for the Management department. He has secured funding from EPSRC, ESRC, InnovateUK, and the EU for collaborative industry projects, mostly to develop practical tools. In 2023, Richard became the MBA director to lead and expand the MBA portfolio.

Responsibilities

• Associate Professor in Business Analytics and Decision Science

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. Currently Richard is supervising one research fellow (EPSRC funded) and three PhD students.

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 designed and developed four new masters or MBA level modules and one new undergraduate module. 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, cloud computing platforms, 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

• Mohammad Fikry Abdullah