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 focuses on developing and applying computational, data-driven, and human-centered approaches to quantity and manage urban resilience in the face of disruptions — from hazards to emerging technologies.

Over the past decade, Dr. Wang’s scholarship has advanced three interconnected areas:

1. Measuring, explaining, and enhancing urban and community resilience, including vulnerability, mobility resilience, and the role of time poverty, and social infrastructure in disasters;
2. Ensuring information agility, integrity, and trustworthy communication in digital and sociotechnical systems, particularly during crises;
3. Planning healthy, adaptive, and future-ready cities through spatial analytics, digital twins, and theory-guided, community-centric AI.

Her pioneering work bridges urban resilience, urban analytics, spatial and infrastructure planning, crisis informatics, and responsible AI. Recognized as one of the top-ranked female scholars in urban analytics globally, Dr. Wang has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications (Google Scholar) in leading journals such as 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. Her recent research further advances explainable deep learning, agentic AI, and generative AI for spatial planning and community resilience.

Dr. Wang has secured more than $3.3 million in research funding, including eight prestigious federal awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Her recognitions include the NSF CAREER Award (2025), AI Pioneer (2025), DCP IDEA 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 has served on the Editorial Board of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering since 2020 and is the Guest 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.