Charles Musselwhite

Charles Brian Alexander Musselwhite (born 16 June 1975) is Professor of Psychology at Aberystwyth University.
He was born in Portsmouth, Hampshire, United Kingdom and educated at Bay House School, Gosport, Hampshire, followed by St Vincent Sixth Form College, Gosport, Hampshire. He went on to read Psychology at University of Southampton (BSc, Psychology, 1998) before completing a PhD in the Transportation Research Group (PhD, 2004) examining attitudes to car driver behaviour. 
He was a Lecturer in Traffic and Transport Psychology at the Centre for Transport & Society at University West of England from 2006-2013, then Associate Professor in Gerontology at the Centre for Innovative Ageing, Swansea University, between 2013 and 2021. 
He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Transport and Health. 
He has research interests two main areas (1) environmental gerontology, examining relationships between environment and health in later stages of life, including road user safety in later life, giving-up driving and creating age friendly neighbourhoods and communities and; (2) transport and health, including the social aspects of transport and mobility. He has been Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on around 40 research projects totalling over £25m research income and has published over 45 journal articles, over 20 book chapters and 5 books. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Ageing and Dementia Research, the Transport and Health Integrated Network and the Centre for Transport and Mobility.
== Notable works ==
His most cited work is the development of a hierarchy of travel and mobility needs for older people deveoped with Hebba Haddad, which has been translated into Spanish, Greek, and Welsh and has been adapted for use in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Israel, Malta and Sweden. The model suggests people travel for three main purposes, (1) utilitarian needs, practically to get from A to B as cheaply and reliably as possibe; (2) affective or psychosocial needs, for independence, freedom, status and to satisfy roles and; (3) aesthetic needs, for the journey itself, to feel and experience mobility, to visit or immerse oneself in beautiful surroundings, or to observe others' mobility or to imagine and think about previous or future mobility. He concludes that when we think about transport for an ageing population we place too much emphasis on only practical reasons for travel at the expense of psychosocial or aesthetic motivations, which is why mobility provision does not meet the needs of older people.
He has also devised a model of mobility capital with Theresa Scott from University of Queensland, based on Pierre Bourdieu theory of capital. The model suggests older people trade off different types of capital in 4 main areas in order to be mobile
* infrastructure capital (technology, services, roads, pavements, finance and economics)
* social capital (friends, family, neighbourhood and community)
* cultural capital (norms, expectations, rules, laws) and
* individual capital (skills, abilities, resilience, adaptation and desire and willingness to change).
He concludes that infrastructure capital is most important but low levels of such capital can be overcome by social capital, while cultural capital and individual capital are harder to change but still important in achieving mobility.
He has co-edited books on mobile e-health, transport and travel in later life, physical activity in later life and geographies of transport in later life. His most recent book, Designing Public Space for and Ageing Population, examines how we improve the design of public space to help people stay mobile in later life, especially as a pedestrian, applying the work of Jan Gehl, William H. Whyte and David Engwicht to an ageing population.
 
Category:1975 births
Category:People from Hampshire
[[Category:Professors]
Category:University of Southampton alumni