Biography:

Yiyi He is an assistant professor in the School of City and Regional Planning (SCaRP) at the College of Design at Georgia Tech, with an affiliation to the Center for Urban Resilience and Analytics (CURA). She is also a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow. Her research centers on the interdisciplinary fields of urban planning, GIScience, climate science, and artificial intelligence. She is interested in building a better understanding of the uncertainty and asymmetric impacts of climate-change-induced extreme weather events (e.g., flooding, wildfires, extreme heat) on critical components of the built environment (e.g., lifeline infrastructure networks, vulnerable neighborhoods). She leverages data-driven approaches, such as GIS, network science, hyperspectral remote sensing, machine learning, and spatial statistics, to tackle complex challenges in climate change and resilience research and to inform more intelligent planning and policy directives.

Her previous work involves using 3D hydrodynamic flood models to simulate flooding under different climate change scenarios and analyze the impact of both coastal and inland flooding on critical infrastructure networks. She received her bachelor’s degree from Nanjing University and her master’s and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley.

Teaching Interest:

My teaching interests lie in urban data science, climate change planning, and geospatial modeling. I am particularly interested in helping students build strong analytical skills. I aim to integrate real-world datasets, high-impact research, and emerging AI tools into the classroom to prepare students for evidence-based planning practice.

Research Interest:

My research examines how climate shocks reshape the built environment, with a particular focus on critical infrastructure systems. I use quantitative geospatial methods to uncover risk pathways, evaluate cascading impacts, and generate evidence that supports more informed and equitable decision-making.

List of Recent Scholarly Work:

Degrees with Year of Award:

Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley, 2022
ML.A., University of California, Berkeley, 2018
B.S., Nanjing University, 2016