Contents
Our Work
The THINK (Transportation-Human Interaction-and-Network Knowledge) Lab studies the sustainability and resilience of a city through the lens of human beings interacting with the physical environment. We generate new knowledge and insights for use in city planning, infrastructure development and policy design. Our research results facilitate real-time disaster response and recovery efforts. Our work is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on the latest methods and ideas in disciplines from social and natural sciences to engineering.
High and Low Tech
We integrate high and low tech, recognizing that all means (methods) are needed
Transdisciplinary
We integrate and transform knowledge from disciplinaries from engineering to science
Problem-driven
Our work is motivated from real-world problems whose solutions will have significant impacts on society
Rooted in Science
Our approach to problems is rooted in science. We generate basic knowledge and tools for use in practice
About Us
We are a group of likely-minded people who got together and work hard for making an impact in science and practice. We share a passion for scientific discoveries and a commitment of making a real difference in this world.
Contact us
Cynthia Chen, Ph.D.
Director
Cynthia Chen is a Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UW. Dr. Chen is an internationally-reknown transportation scholar. THINK lab centers around three inter-connected themes: travel behavior (aka human mobility) analysis, resilient infrastructures, and their intersections. Cynthia Chen received her Ph.D. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2001. Prior to joining UW, she taught for six years from 2003 to 2009 in the City College of New York as an assistant professor. Between 2017 and 2019, she served as a Program Director of the Civil Infrastructure Systems (CIS) Program in the Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation (CMMI) Division of the Engineering (ENG) Directorate of National Science Foundation (NSF).
Xiangyang Guan, Ph.D.
Honorary THINK LAB member
Dr. Guan is a transportation modeler with WSP in Atlanta and is an honorary member of the THINK lab. He earned his Ph.D. in civil engineering from the University of Washington 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.
Grace Jia
PhD Student and Researcher
gineering, and a master’s degree from University of California, Berkeley in transportation engineering. Grace joined the THINK lab as a Ph.D. student in September 2020. Grace’s research interests include spatial heterogeneity in disease spreading, within-city mixing patterns, and transportation big data.
Ekin Ugurel
PhD Student and Researcher
Ekin received his bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in May 2021. He is pursuing a Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Cynthia Chen. His research interests lie in assessing the extent to which sustainable infrastructure can improve community resilience, innovating policy tools to maintain transportation network resiliency, and using novel modeling tools to better understand transportation networks.
Kaitlyn Ng
MS Student and Researcher
Kaitlyn Ng received her bachelor’s in civil engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She joined THINK Lab in September 2022 and is pursuing her master’s degree in transportation engineering. Her research interests lie in equitable transportation planning and impacts on policymaking which include topics such as food access and quantifying human behavior.
Kittibhum Tasanasuwan
MS student and researcher
Arsalan Esmaeili
PhD student and researcher
Arsalan is currently a Ph.D. student at the Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) Department of the University of Washington. He received his Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering and his Master’s in Transportation Engineering both from the University of Tehran. His master’s thesis focused on traffic safety. Arsalan joined the THINK lab in January 2023, and his research interests are Big Data Analytics, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning.
Zhengyang Li
Visiting PhD student
Zhengyang received a bachelor’s degree in railway transportation and a master’s degree in transportation planning and management from Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, China. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Zhengyang joined the THINK lab as a visiting Ph.D. student in March 2023. His research interests involve transportation network modeling, public transport operation, and modeling resilience in communities.
Previous THINK lab Members
PhD or MS students advised by Dr. Cynthia Chen (as chair)
Name Degree earned/position Year Thesis title
Cristina Cano-Calhoun MS 2019-2021 Community and agency perspectives on local self-reliance in disasters
Joanne Lin MS 2020-2022 Socio-economic and spatial disparity of bus ridership impacts in King County, Washington, During COVID-19
Ian Ren MS 2019-2021 Building Reproducible Workflows using Transportation Data and COVID data (co-advised with Ka Yee Yeung of Computer Science)
Katherine Idziorek PhD 2016-2021 Social networks and disaster preparedness at the community level: the role of social ties and social infrastructure in connecting people with essential resources (co-advised with Dan Abramson of Urban Design and Planning); currently assistant professor at UNC-Charlotte
Yuanjie Tu PhD student 2019-2020
Xi Zhu Ph.D. 2017-2020 Individual preference learning with collaborative learning framework (co-advised with Dr. Shuai Huang of Industrial Systems and Engineering)
Feilong Wang PhD student 2016-2020
Xiangyang Guan Ph.D 2013-2018 A general methodology for inferring failure propagation process from post-disaster disruptions data
Wang, Menglin Ph.D. 2010-2014 Understanding time of day variations in human mobility patterns
Chen, Li Ph.D. 2007-2012 Multi-level modeling of the effectiveness of traffic calming measures
Lin, Haiyun Ph.D. 2007-2012 Understanding housing search and residential location choices
Chen, Jason Ph.D. 2004-2009 Residential relocation choices and the consequent behavioral changes
Rochelle Starrette M.S 2016-2018 Identification of Urban Scaling Behavior for Transportation Mode Share
Zhu, Xi M.S. 2014-2016 The built environment affects non-motorized travel behaviors differently for lower- and higher-income people
Guan, Xiangyang M.S. 2011-2013 Using social media tools to assess Sandy-related damages
Murphy, John M.S. 2010-2012 Under what circumstances is walking a better choice than taking a bus
Ottosson, Dadi M.S. 2010-2012 Elasticity of on-street parking demand in response to parking meter increases in Seattle, WA
Wang, Tingting M.S. 2009-2010 Attitudes, Built Environment and Travel Behavior
Li, Wei M.S. 2008-2009 Accessibility in Time and Space
Varley, Don M.S. 2007-2009 Understanding the effects of gasoline price, GDP and population on ridership
Sit, Eugene M.S. 2006-2008 Sensitivity analysis of the Best Practice Model (BPM)
Postdocs advised
Jae Hyun Lee PostDoc 2016-2017 Researcher at Koren Transp. Institute
Peng Chen PostDoc 2015-2016 Assistant Professor at USF
Former visiting professors and students
Dr. Ni Dong is a visiting scholar and joint the group in Oct. 2018. She received her PhD degree from Central South University in 2016. She is now an assistant professor in Southwest
Jiaotong University and working on data-driven travel behavioral and safety risk analyses, most quantitatively, as means of addressing urban sustainability challenges.
Dr. Xiang Zhang, visiting Professor 2018-2019, Wuhan University. Dr. Xiang Zhang is an associate professor at School of Resource and Environmental Science, Wuhan University. He received his Ph.D. in Cartography and Geographic Information Science from University of Twente, Netherlands in 2012. His research interest includes integration, analysis and visualization of spatiotemporal data, volunteered geographic information (VGI) and computational spatial science. In his previous works, methods from computational geometry, pattern recognition, and machine learning were extended to tackle fundamental and applied problems in GIScience.
Dr. Pengyu Yan, visiting Professor 2016-2017, from School of Management and Economics at University of Electronic Science and Technology of China.
An-Tsu Chen. An-Tsu worked in THINKLAB from 2016 to 2017. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Economics at University of Washington.