AFFILIATIONS
Founding Faculty, Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER)
Founder and Director, Urban Agility and Resilience Laboratory
Affiliate Faculty, UF Informatics Institute
Affiliate Faculty, UF Transportation Institute
Affiliate Faculty, Warren B. Nelms Institute for the Connected World
Affiliate Faculty, Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center
Affiliate Faculty, UF Health Cancer Center
EDUCATION
Virginia Tech, PhD in Civil Engineering
Beijing Jiaotong University, Master of Valuation
Beijing Jiaotong University, Bachelor in Construction Management
TEACHING
URP 4273: Survey of Planning Information Systems
URP 4905: Undergraduate Special Studies
URP 6223: Introduction to Urban Analytics
URP 6270: Introduction to Planning Information Systems
URP 6341: Urban Planning Project/
LAA6656C: Advanced Landscape Architecture Design
URP 7940: Supervised Teaching
URP 7979: Advanced Research
URP 7980: Doctoral Research
RESEARCH
Urban Resilience; Urban Analytics; Spatial and Infrastructure Planning; Crisis Informatics (Social Media); Healthy Cities, Human Dynamics; Responsible AI; Smart and Connected Communities.
Opportunities
The Urban Agility and Resilience Lab at UF is recruiting doctoral students and a postdoctoral scholar. For more information, please visit https://www.complexresilientcities.com/positions/.
BIO
Dr. Yan Wang is an Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning within the College of Design, Construction and Planning, University of Florida. She is a founding faculty member of the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) and the founder and director of the Urban Agility and Resilience Lab. Her research uses big data, computation, and AI to understand and strengthen how cities and communities withstand, recover from, and adapt to a range of disruptions, from hazards to emerging technologies. Her work generates insights and tools that serve planners, engineers, public health researchers and the communities they work with.
Over the past decade, Dr. Wang’s scholarship has advanced three interconnected areas:
- AI and Future-Ready City Planning: Developing theory-guided AI models and spatial planning tools for post-disaster regeneration, climate adaptation, and inclusive land use and infrastructure planning.
- Urban Resilience, Disaster Response, and Community Health: Measuring how communities respond to disruption through behavioral data and spatial analysis, and developing planning frameworks for improved disaster preparedness, recovery, and health outcomes for vulnerable populations.
- Crisis Informatics, Emergency Planning, and Risk Communication: Building AI-powered systems for real-time disaster sensing and impact assessment, and developing planning and engineering frameworks that improve how communities access, trust, and act on information during crises.
Her work has produced more than 50 peer-reviewed publications (Google Scholar) in venues including Journal of the American Planning Association, Nature Scientific Data, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Sustainable Cities and Society, Landscape and Urban Planning, Risk Analysis, Natural Hazards Review, JAMA Network Open, Journal of Management in Engineering, and Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering. She has secured more than $3.3 million in research funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health, and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Dr. Wang’s recognitions include the NSF CAREER Award (2025), AI Pioneer (2025), DCP Interdisciplinary Excellence Award (2025), UF Excellence Awards for Assistant Professors (2022), UF Global Research Fellow (2018), Weather Ready Research Fellowships (Natural Hazard Center, 2021), Mitigation Matters Award (Natural Hazard Center, 2020), ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering Accolade Best Paper Award (2021), UF Research Promotion Initiative Award (2021), UF Great Teaching Certificate (2021), DCP Excellence in Research Award (2021) and Virginia Tech IGEP BioBuild Fellowship (2015-2018).
Her teaching emphasizes tailored pedagogies and contextualized curricula for urban analytics, contributing centrally to the department’s Urban Analytics Program and the integration of spatial data science. Dr. Wang serves on the Editorial Boards of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering (since 2020), and Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (since 2026), and is the Guest Co-Editor for the Journal of Planning Education and Research’s special issue on AI and Urban Planning (2024-2027).
Prior to joining UF, Dr. Wang earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech and both her master’s degree in asset valuation and bachelor’s degree in construction engineering and management from the School of Economics and Management at Beijing Jiaotong University.
AWARDS
Interdisciplinary Excellence Award (IDEA), College of Design, Construction and Planning (2025)