Chris Rogers spent three years in the civil engineering industry, becoming a chartered engineer as a result of this practical experience, before returning to academia to research pipeline soil-structure interaction. He lectured at Nottingham and Loughborough Universities before taking up his current position at the University of Birmingham in 1998. His research portfolio is dominated by two primary, necessarily interrelated, themes of infrastructure engineering and future cities. Building on research into trenchless technology, buried pipes and road foundations, he led the Mapping and Assessing the Underworld research programmes. These address the complex challenges of locating, mapping and remotely assessing the condition of subsurface pipelines and cables. He researches robotics for streetworks (Self-Repairing Cities, employing surface-mounted and drone robots to assess the condition of and repair damaged road structures) and swarms of miniature robots to assess the condition of buried pipelines (Pipebots). In iBUILD, he worked with economists to explore infrastructure system interdependencies and alternative business models. He is a founding member of the UK Collaboratorium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities (UKCRIC), a multi-university initiative aiming to transform the UK's research supported by a capital grant of £138m from BEIS, and serves as UKCRIC's Director of Research Integration. He is Director of the new £28m UKCRIC National Buried Infrastructure Facility. His 20-year programme of research into future cities has focussed on sustainability, resilience, liveability and (true) smartness, and has resulted in a suite of methodologies to support a new Theory of Change for infrastructure and urban systems. For example, he led the multi-disciplinary Urban Futures consortium yielding a methodology to test the resilience of a city system intervention using extreme-yet-plausible future scenarios, and led the Liveable Cities programme grant exploring the performance of future cities in relation to individual & societal and planetary wellbeing. He is researching novel approaches for the design of cities to improve people's health and wellbeing, embracing urban diagnostics, systems thinking and practice, urban observatories for real-time trials of interventions, city governance and the move towards transdisciplinarity. He chaired the ICE’s Research, Development & Innovation Panel from 2010-2020 and was a member of the Lead Expert Group of the UK Government Foresight Future of Cities project.