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.

Geographer with a focus on conservation, human-environmental system dynamics, protected areas management, restoration, ecosystem services, wildlife crime prevention.

BSc & MSc at Humboldt-University Berlin/Germany.

Working experience:
- WWF Azerbaijan & Armenia (2017)
- Helmholtz Zentrum for Environmental Research (UFZ) (2020)
- German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) (2021-2022)

- RA at Humboldt University at the lab of Urban Landscape Ecology (2018-2019)
- RA at Humboldt University at the lab of Conservation Biogeography (2019-2020)
- TA at Humboldt University at the lab of Applied Geoinformatics (2016-2017) 

Obtained grants:
- female career fund (Geography Department HU) 
- DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) 
- ERASMUS+ grant
- PROMOS 
- GEOG Student Fellowship for International Collaborations
 

Victor is a Ph.D. candidate in the Center for Geographical Information Science, University of Maryland, College Park. He is broadly interested at the cutting-edge of research and development in urban informatics, smart cities, and geospatial data science; specifically, the science that investigates the ‘where’ and ‘why’ of various human and natural phenomena in cities.

Before coming to Maryland, he studied at the University of Lagos, Nigeria, and graduated with a first-class bachelor’s degree in urban planning. Beyond academics, Victor has over three years of software engineering experience as well as experience building and deploying machine learning models. His major tools include Python, Scikit-learn, Keras, Tensorflow, and React.js. He hopes to deploy his skills in software engineering, data science, and urban planning to conceptualize and contribute significantly to smart cities research.