Dr. Yan Wang is an assistant professor at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, U.S.A. She is also the founding faculty of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) and directs Urban Agility and Resilience Laboratory at FIBER. Dr. Wang received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering at Virginia Tech in 2018, and she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Construction Management (2012) and master’s degree in Asset Valuation (2015) both from Beijing Jiao Tong University. Dr. Wang is a UF Global Research Fellow (2018), Virginia Tech IGEP BioBuild Fellow (2015), Natural Hazard Center Weather-Ready Research Fellow, and the recipient of the UF DCP Excellence in Research Award (2021), UF Research Promotion Initiative Award (2021) and ASCE JME Honorable Mention Award (2021).
Dr. Wang’s research concerns resilient, safe, equitable and smart cities. She develops cutting-edge AI-based data analytical and geo-visualization techniques to detect crises, assess damage, and coordinate urban safety. She creates new data-driven approaches for measuring community resilience and investigates evidence-based urban planning for extreme climate/weather events resilience. She also studies complex interactions between information, human behaviors and built environments under extreme events in order to inform equitable risk communication, combat misinformation, and disseminate targeted warnings. Her research interest also extends to smart, safe and accessible built environment, for example, preparing cities for disruptive technology innovations.
Her research has been published in top-tier peer-review journals and conference proceedings across engineering, computing, urban planning, and crisis informatics disciplines including ASCE Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering, ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering, International Journal of Project Management, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Computers in Human Behavior, Sustainable Cities and Society, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Natural Hazards, and ISCRAM, ICCCE, CRC, HICSS. She is the principal investigator for more than ten awarded research projects funded by the National Science Foundation, Natural Hazards Center, and the University of Florida.
She recently has been working on three projects that have been funded by National Science Foundation:
NSF SCC-PG: SmartCurb: Building Smart Urban Curb Environments
NSF SCC-PG: Coordinated Safety Management Across Smart Communities