Director
Xilei Zhao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida
Email: xilei.zhao@essie.ufl.edu
Dr. Xilei Zhao (赵曦蕾) is an assistant professor in Transportation Engineering at the University of Florida, where she leads the Smart, Equitable, Resilient Mobility Systems (SERMOS) Lab. She received a Master’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Statistics and a Ph.D. degree in Civil Engineering from the Johns Hopkins University. Zhao’s work focuses on developing and applying data and computational science methods to tackle challenging problems in transportation and resilience. Her work has been published in leading transportation and resilience journals, e.g., Transportation Research Part A, C & D and Safety Science. She received the Travel Behaviour and Society Outstanding Paper Award 2020 for her paper entitled “Prediction and behavioral analysis of travel mode choice: A comparison of machine learning and logit models.” She also won the NSF CAREER Award and the Early-Career Research Fellowship of NASEM’s Gulf Research Program. Her research has been supported by multiple funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the U.S. Geological Survey. Zhao serves on the editorial board of Data Science for Transportation.
Postdocs
Luyu Liu, Ph.D.
Postdoc, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida
Email: luyuliu@ufl.edu
PH.D. Students
Shangkun Jiang
Ph.D. student, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida
Email: jiang.shangkun@ufl.edu
Shangkun Jiang received his B.E. degree in Transportation Engineering from Dalian University of Technology and his M.E. degree in Traffic and Transportation from Southeast University. His research interests include multimodal data fusion in intelligent transportation systems based on deep learning and data analytics. Outside of work, Shangkun enjoys staying active by going to the gym and playing basketball.
Yuran Sun
Ph.D. student, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida
Email: yuransun@ufl.edu
Yuran Sun received her B.S degree in Statistics and Financial Mathematics from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and her M.S degree in Statistics from National University of Singapore. Her research interests are the application of interpretable machine learning models and data analytics. She is currently working on evacuation decision prediction and destination analysis. Yuran is passionate about learning languages. She is learning French, Korean and Cantonese.
Xiaojian Zhang
Ph.D. student, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida
Email: xiaojianzhang@ufl.edu
Xiaojian Zhang received his B. E. degree in transportation from Southwest Jiaotong University. He is currently studying ridesourcing demand prediction and demand-responsive transit simulation. Xiaojian has a strong interest in the application of machine-learning techniques. He also enjoys playing the piano and watching basketball and soccer games.
undergraduate & M.S. StudentS
Yilong Dai
M.S. student, Computer Science, University of Florida
Aubrey Dolbeck
Undergraduate student, Geography, University of Florida
Sara Garces
Undergraduate student, Civil Engineering, University of Florida
Matthew Mapa
Undergraduate student, Computer Science, University of Florida
Ally Recalde
Undergraduate/M.S. student, Geography, University of Florida
Joshua Salim
M.S. student, Data Science, University of Florida
Zhuoqun Xue
M.S. student, Computer Science, University of Florida
Group photos
Past Students (and their first job placement)
Ph.D. StudentS:
Dr. Yiming Xu (2019-2023): Postdoc, University of Texas at Austin
Dr. Shirin Noei (2019-2020): Research Assistant Professor, Tennessee Tech University
Dr. Hossein Arshad (Visiting Scholar, 2023): Postdoc, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
M.S. StudentS:
Mr. Dharmam Savani (2022-2023)
Mr. Ruoyang Xiong (2021-2022): Senior Software Engineer, L&T Technology Services
Ms. Lin Su (2021-2022): Ph.D. student, University of Texas at Austin
Mr. Yepeng Liu (2021-2022): Ph.D. student, University of Central Florida
Ms. Tingshan Pan (2021-2022)
Mr. Ningzhe Xu (2020-2021): Ph.D. student, University of Alabama
Mr. Zhuoxuan Cao (2020-2021): Ph.D. student, University of Maryland, College Park
Mr. Mudit Paliwal (2020-2021): Product management analyst, WR Berkley
Mr. Kaitai Yang (2020-2021): Ph.D. student, University of Utah
UNDERGRADUATE StudentS:
Ms. Ana Forrister (2022-2023): M.S. student, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Mr. Erik Huang (2022): Ph.D. student, Northwestern University
Ms. Qi Zheng (2021-2022)
Mr. Alex Wu (2020-2021): Capital markets analyst, One American Bank