Zhao, Yingrui
Bio
Yingrui Zhao is a Ph.D. candidate in Geography at the University of Maryland, College Park, specializing in Spatiotemporal Data Modeling, Travel Behavior Modeling, and GeoAI. Her research focuses on analyzing human mobility patterns by integrating big mobility data, machine learning, and GIScience methods to model travel behavior and analyze the spatial dynamics of transportation systems. She applied explainable machine learning and LLMs to analyze large-scale trip and social media datasets, offering new perspectives on how mobility interacts with demographics and built-environment. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the Journal of Transport Geography.
Before joining UMD, she earned her Master’s degree in Community and Regional Planning from the University of Texas at Austin, where she developed the Node-Place-People (NPP) model for evaluating transit-oriented development and conducted research on affordable housing supply through land use optimization for corridor TOD.
At UMD’s Master of Science in GIS Program, she serves as a teaching assistant and lab instructor, supporting a range of graduate courses including GEOG 656: Advanced Programming for GIS, GEOG 651: Spatial Statistics, GEOG 653: Spatial Analysis, GEOG 687: Applied GEOINT – Regional GeoStrategic Issues, GEOG 683: Hazards and Emergency Management, and GEOG 661: Fundamentals of Geospatial Intelligence.
Degrees
The University of Texas at Austin - MS
China Agriculture University - BE
Areas of Interest
- Spatiotemporal Data Modeling
- Travel Behavior and Urban Form
- Big Mobile Device Data
- Geographical Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI)
- Application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Geoscience
| 4600 River Road, Suite 334 (send mail to 2181 LeFrak)
| yzhao120@umd.edu