Dr. Pierre Gras

Pierre Gras is a geospatial strategist, data innovator, and passionate advocate for open, evidence-based government. He heads the Spatial Competence Center at Hamburg’s Agency for Geoinformation and Surveying, leading around 100 experts across four departments and ten teams.

His work focuses on turning complex urban data into practical intelligence. A flagship example is Hamburg’s AI-enabled Urban Digital Twin: an open and reusable ecosystem combining urban data, simulation models, open-source technologies, and natural-language access to help policymakers explore scenarios and make better-informed decisions.

Pierre’s path into urban innovation began far from city hall. As an agroecologist, he studied how ants, bats, and birds influence cocoa production and ecosystem services in Indonesia. He later investigated wildlife movement and disease patterns in Berlin while helping to establish a spatial data infrastructure for research data. Moving from analyzing urban data to making it accessible at scale, he joined Hamburg’s Urban Data Platform as a data scientist and IoT engineer.

Today, he brings a scientist’s curiosity and a public innovator’s ambition to the question of how digital twins can make cities more transparent, resilient, and ready for the future.