Bio

Dr Qunshan Zhao joined UBDC in May 2019. He leads UBDC's Urban Sensing & Analytics research and is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Analytics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He holds both PhD and MA in Geography/GIScience from the Arizona State University in the USA and a BE in Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, and GIS from the Wuhan University in China. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience (KER) and Spatial Analysis Research Center (SPARC) at the Arizona State University.

His research interest focuses on creating a sustainable urban environment by using analytical approaches including GIScience (geographic information systems, remote sensing and spatial analysis), machine learning/statistics, operations research, and urban climate modeling and instrumentation. Ongoing research efforts include urban infrastructure location optimization (urban green infrastructure; alternative fueling stations), human-environment interactions (human activity space; urban crime and night lights; invasive species and human disturbance), heat resilience (urban heat exposure citizen science program; Salvation Army utility assistance program efficiency improvement; heat-related morbidity/mortality analysis), and methodology development (3D urban landscape expansion index).

He has published his research in a number of international peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, including Building and Environment, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, Remote Sensing, and conference proceedings of GIScience 2014 and 2016. His dissertation received the J. Warren Nystrom Award from the American Association of Geographers (AAG) as one of the most outstanding research papers, based upon a recent dissertation in 2018. He is serving as the Board Member of the Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group (SAM) at AAG from 2018-2021.