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 AI and data science methods to tackle challenging problems in transportation and resilience. Her work has been widely published in leading transportation and resilience journals, e.g., Transportation Research Part A, C & D, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, and Safety Science.

Zhao is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and the Early-Career Research Fellowship of NASEM’s Gulf Research Program. She also 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.” 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 is an active committee member of TRB AMR20: Committee on Disaster Response, Emergency Evacuations, and Business Continuity, and serves on the editorial board of Data Science for Transportation. 

Postdocs

Sangung Park, Ph.D.

Postdoc, Civil and Coastal Engineering, University of Florida

Email: spark10@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

Group photos

Past Students (and their first job placement)

Postdocs:

Dr. Luyu Liu (2023-2024): Assistant Professor, Auburn University

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. Aubrey Dolbeck (2024)

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