Hi, I am Zhaoxi.  Currently, I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Urban & Regional Planning in College of Design, Construction and Planning, University of Florida.

 

As an urban designer and researcher. I work at the intersection of urban environment, technology and human health. Research and design are two essential parts of my previous works. I am always wondering how to bridge the gap between academia and industry, and use practice-oriented research or research-based design to address people’s needs and concerns, and build a better neighbourhood, a better service, a better product, further a better life for people living in their cities. 

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I see myself as an urban enthusiast at the dynamic intersection of the built environment, human health and technology. Faced with the challenge of urban planning and design in multiple domains (health, public space, and climate change), I am committed to leveraging interdisciplinary knowledge and cutting-edge tools to build capacity for technology-enabled transformation of public participation in future urban governance. I have years of research and design experience in cutting-edge theories and methods, including big data analytics, mobile sensing and urban AI, with a particular focus on innovative engagement at the human and community level. My current focus is on human-environment interaction in participatory planning, which has led me to develop new tools and methods to measure human behaviour and well-being in cities, to gather public opinion, and to study human decision-making processes in the face of urban stress, traffic hazards and environmental risks. This knowledge is important for today's scientists to apply technology to address global challenges such as climate change, disasters, sustainability and health inequalities at the individual, street and community levels.

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I am passionate about contributing to state-of-the-art methods and theories, and applying them to solve real-world problems. I joined the Big Data Center for Environment and Health (BERTHA) at Aarhus University, Denmark, with a Ph.D. fellowship in 2019 and defended my Ph.D. thesis "Urban Health Sensing: Measuring human physiological stress response to urban environments using personalized sensors" in November 2022. This work, which provides context-specific insights at the individual level, also bridges the knowledge gap between macro-level urban planning and micro-level human experience. ​ In September 2023, I joined CUSP at New York University as a Faculty Fellow. During my appointment at CUSP,  I was leading an independent research project entitled 'AI-driven Urban Agent: A Tool for Participatory Planning and Urban Governance'. This innovation aims to apply generative AI and mobile intelligence technologies to develop an AI-driven urban agent equipped with a chatbot and dashboard to facilitate human-environment interaction, encourage people to become more involved in public participation, and make urban spaces more supportive and interactive in the near future. I also collaborated with the Immersive Computing Lab at CUSP on a project 'Assess the Effectiveness of VR-based Human Interaction for Flooding Preparedness and Emergency Responses'. In this project, we simulated the 3D urban flooding scenarios using Unity and studied human self-motivated protection during urban flooding and decision making process. 

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​Over the years, I have had the privilege of teaching at both the MSc and PhD levels. In 2019, I served as a teaching assistant for an architectural design studio in the English Program for Master in Architecture (EPMA) at Tsinghua University. In 2024, I designed and taught a full MSc-level course, Urban Decision Model, introducing students to systems thinking, urban complexity, and computational optimization and simulation for decision-making. Meanwhile, I have supervised and co-supervised three summer studies and three capstone projects, mentoring more than fifteen master’s students. In 2025, I co-organized the CUSP PhD Colloquium for over twenty doctoral students. Now at University of Florida, I am teaching the Planning and Design for 25 Fall.

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