MEET THE PLAYERS
The Executive Team
Cynthia Chen (Lead-PI) is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Chen is an internationally-renowned transportation scholar, whose work focuses on the intersection of human mobility analysis and infrastructure resiliency. Between 2017 and 2019, Dr. Chen served as a Program Director of the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Program in the Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) Division of the Engineering Directorate of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Before joining the UW, she was an Assistant Professor in the City College of New York.
Ryan Qi Wang (Co-PI) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on two interrelated areas: Human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters, and geosocial networks in big cities. He is an Associate Research Director on social media of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI). Before joining Northeastern, he was a Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Sociology at Harvard University, where he found research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the “big data” from Twitter.
Shuai Huang (Co-PI) is an Associate Professor in Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Huang’s research is driven by challenging data analytics problems, emphasizes innovation in statistics for problem solving, and targets system-level decision-making and quality improvement. He develops methodologies for modeling, monitoring, diagnosis, and prognosis of complex systems. He also develops novel statistical and data mining models to integrate heterogeneous datasets. Before joining the UW, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of South Florida.
The Junior Team
Ekin Ugurel (Ph.D. Student) is pursuing graduate study in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington, being advised by Prof. Cynthia Chen. He received his Bachelor’s of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. His other ongoing research aims to assess how remote work may change land use and urban mobility patterns. His research interests lie at the intersection of mobility and big data/policy/human behavior.
Yanchao Wang (Ph.D. Student) is pursuing graduate study in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University, being advised by Prof. Qi (Ryan) Wang. He received his Bachelor’s degree from the Wuhan University of Technology and a Master’s degree from Northeastern University. His research interest includes the urban mobility network and brain-computer interface. In recent years, his work mainly focused on understanding the spreading of epidemics based on mobility networks in the US, and social inequity revealed by the demographic and mobility data.
Dr. Xiangyang Guan (Postdoc) earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Washington in 2019 and is now a postdoc researcher. He earned his bachelor’s degree in transportation engineering from Tongji University in Shanghai, China. He came to the University of Washington as a master student in 2011 and joined THINK Lab in 2013. Dr. Guan’s research interests involve resilience of infrastructure systems, social media data mining, and modeling the complex dynamics in interdependent infrastructure networks.
PROJECT COLLABORATORS
| Mario Small | Harvard University |
| Esteban Moro | MIT |
| Marta Gonzalez | University of California, Berkeley |
| Shih-Lung Shaw | University of Tennessee |
| Pascal Van Hentenryck | Georgia Tech |
| Kay Axhausen | Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich |
| Yu Liu | Peking University |
| Toshi Yamamoto | Nagoya University |
| Nan Li | Tsinghua University |
| Ram Pendyala | Arizona State University |
| Sean Qian | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Laura Alessandretti | Technical University of Denmark |
| Sune Lehmann | Technical University of Denmark |