Amaya Vega is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Economics at Atlantic Technological University (ATU) and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of International Economics at the University of Valencia, Spain.

Amaya has over 20 years’ experience working on transport policy evaluation, focusing on passenger and freight transport demand analysis, maritime transport, and ports. Amaya is leads the transport research stream of the Atlantic Futures project, a €4million four-year cross-border research project funded by The North-South Research Programme. She works closely with local authorities, regional, and national policymakers across government departments in both jurisdictions, as well as private sector transport operators and local communities to assess transport mode and route choice dependencies, and the implications for regional competitiveness. Amaya is also a member of the working group for the Sustainable Mobility Index for rural towns in Ireland’s Western region, led by the Western Development Commission.

Amaya is the co-PI in a number of recent projects including the EMBRACE-Mobility project, in collaboration with University of Galway, and funded under the Research Ireland/SFI National Challenge Programme on Sustainable Communities. Amaya is also partner in the ROBUST project, led by Trinity College Dublin, and funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland.

Amaya is committed to developing and supporting PhD students in ATU through the IDEAS (Innovation, Digitalisation, Enterprise and Society) doctoral programme funded under the TU Research and Innovation Supporting Enterprise (TU RISE) scheme co-financed by the Government of Ireland and the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Through her work on the analysis of human decisions using advanced discrete choice models and the valuation of travel attributes through transport demand models, Amaya aims to support the development of more sustainable and efficient transport systems. Her research plays an important role in shaping evidence-based strategies that promote the net-zero transition and more equitable transport in Ireland.

Transport Economics and Policy; Regional and Spatial economics; Applied Microeconomics; Behavioral Economics