Meet the team
Qunshan Zhao
Professor Qunshan Zhao joined UBDC in May 2019. He leads UBDC's Urban Sensing & Analytics research theme and is a Professor 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 Centre (SPARC) at the Arizona State University.
His research interests focus on creating a sustainable urban future and tackling related social, economic, and environmental problems by using new forms of data and related analytical approaches including GIScience (geographic information systems, remote sensing, and spatial analysis), machine learning/deep learning/statistics, operations research, sensor networks, and urban climate modelling and instrumentation. Ongoing research efforts include urban infrastructure location optimisation (urban green infrastructure; bike sharing stations, alternative refueling stations location modelling), human-environment interactions (human mobility patterns in urban/natural spaces, particularly by mobile phone app data), housing energy efficiency and fuel poverty (fuel poverty and indoor housing environment sensing and evaluation), 3D city modelling, and open source spatial optimisation methods development (pysal/spopt).
Qunshan’s dissertation received the J. Warren Nystrom Award from the American Association of Geographers as one of the most outstanding research papers, based upon a recent dissertation in 2018. Since 2021, he has served as the Secretary of Quantitative Methods Research Group at RGS-IBG. He is currently in the Grant Assessment Panel of the ESRC-SDAI programme and serves as the Series Advisory Editors for the Urban Book Series at Springer.
Most recently, Qunshan serves as the programme chair/co-chair/committee member to help organise and host multiple major international academic conferences in the UK including GISRUK 2023 (Glasgow), CPGIS 2023 (London), GIScience 2023 (Leeds), AGILE 2024 (Glasgow), and the upcoming Alan Turing Institute Urban Analytics Programme Event 2024 (Glasgow).
Positions
Professor in Urban Analytics