Brian MacAulay

Brian MacAulay is the lead economist at Digital Catapult. Brian has over two years of experience working as a national economist for Canal & River Trust, where they were responsible for providing expert advice on demonstrating the economic, environmental and social impact of its activities. This included developing, commissioning, managing and reporting on evaluation and related research, as well as providing quality assurance on the content, results, methodology and validity of the data.

During their time at Canal & River Trust, Brian also supported the development of its Outcomes Measurement Framework for calculating wider economic, environmental and social benefits of the waterways. Brian project managed the Trust's academic partners and provided detailed economic and environmental modelling advice.

Brian worked closely with academe and consultancies to identify and develop applications of new research and data collection to support the measurement of activities across CRT’s 2,000 miles of network. Brian was one of the first to pilot the use of anonymised mobile phone data for modelling visitor numbers to the waterways and undertook a feasibility study to appraise commissioning an Agent Based Model to simulate boat movements across the network.

Brian also contributed to external projects as an invited expert and briefed senior teams on external projects such as Future Cities and emerging potential applications of large scale data analytics and other emerging areas that could impact on CRT.

Brian MacAulay completed a Masters of Science in Economics at Birkbeck, University of London, and also studied business studies at the Polytechnic of North London. Brian attended Southam High School for their secondary education.