Olena Holubowska is a postdoctoral researcher. She works within the SNSF-funded project Magnet Cities? Immigrants’ inclusion across the urban–rural continuum, which investigates how immigrants settle and integrate across cities, towns, and rural areas in Switzerland, and how spatial context shapes their social inclusion and opportunities.

Her research interest lies at the intersection of urban studies, migration, and data science, exploring how segregation and mobility shape migrants’ sense of belonging and attachment to urban environments. Combining large-scale mobility data, survey research, and spatial statistics, her work aims to understand how everyday movements and interactions influence social inclusion and urban cohesion.

Before joining the University of Neuchâtel, Olena completed her PhD at KU Leuven, Belgium in the Spatial and Mobility Analytics Lab (SAMBAL) under the supervision of Professor Ate Poorthuis. Her doctoral dissertation, A quantitative analysis of the variation and socio-spatial inequality in (intra-)urban human mobility using big data, investigated patterns of segregation and inequality through the lens of human mobility. She also holds a Master’s degree in Mathematical Modelling and Computation from the Technical University of Denmark, specializing in social data science and econometrics.

Olena has been awarded several research grants and fellowships, including the SoBigData Grant (University of Tartu, 2024), the French Embassy Research Grant (Paris School of Economics, 2024), and the FWO Long Travel Grant (University of Auckland, 2025). She has also been recognized in the NetMob competition for her project Extreme Heat is Associated with Reductions in Human Activity. In addition, she has received the IRS Academy Grant (Social Scientific Spatial Research), the Oxford Summer Institute in Computational Social Science Scholarship (2022), the Winter Workshop on Complex Systems Scholarship (2023), the BROAD-ER Winter School Scholarship (2024), and research funding from the School of Cities, University of Toronto.

Selected publications:

• Hołubowska, O., & Poorthuis, A. (2025). Examining the impact of daily urban activity on spatial segregation: Disparities in the proportion of foreign-born residents across residential areas and visited locations.Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 51(1), 324–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2024.2352502.
• Hołubowska, O., & Poorthuis, A. (2025). Spaces of Encounter: The Relationship Between Amenities and Visitor Diversity. Population, Space and Place, 31(1), e2879. https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2879.
• Hołubowska, O., Dementeva, D., & Poorthuis, A. (2025). Neighbors and visitors: Impact of diversity on attitudes toward migrants. Ethnic and Racial Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2539907.
• Vanmarcke, D., Holubowska, O., Poorthuis, A., Mangelschots, B., & Daisne, J.-F. (2025). How Much Can Optimization of Hypofractionation Help to Reduce Carbon-Equivalent Emissions? A Single-Center Modeling Study. Advances in Radiation Oncology, 10(6), 101781. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adro.2025.101781.

Preprints / working papers:

• Renninger, A., Holubowska, O., & Blanchard, P. (2025). Remote sensing and GPS mobility reveal heat’s impact on human activity across diverse climates. arXiv:2409.20437. Https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2409.20437
• Hołubowska, O., Poorthuis, A., Sila-Nowicka, K., & Chuang, I-T. (2025). Perceived vs. statistical diversity in urban activity spaces. SocArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/7mzdr_v1