Speaker Biographies

Sam Gailey is a Population Health Postdoctoral Fellow in the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota. Her interdisciplinary research integrates methods and theory from the health and social sciences to understand how local environments "get under the skin" and shape socioeconomic and racial disparities. Much of Sam's work leverages longitudinal and geospatial data from population-based registers to identify health disparities arising from the unequal distribution of community resources.

Ying Song is an assistant professor at the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota. Her research focuses on developing and applying spatial methods to visualize, analyze, and model movement and change in geographic space with respect to time. Her major empirical focus is human mobility and accessibility within transportation networks. Her recent projects focus on developing methods to extract activity-travel patterns from smartphone-based travel survey data and promote social equity in transportation.

Huyen Le is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Ohio State. Her research centers at the intersection of urban transportation, environment, and health. Her current work explores the environmental health impacts of everyday travel.

Dr. Alireza Ermagun is the Director of the Mobility Observatory and Data Analytics Lab (MODAL) and an Assistant Professor of Transport at the Richard A. Rula School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Mississippi State University. He is the co-founder of Findings Press, serves on the Editorial Board of Transport Reviews and Journal of Transport Geography, serves as Research Coordinator and Member of the TRB Standing Committees on Women and Gender in Transportation (AME20) and Urban Freight Transportation (AT025), and has been appointed to the Board of Governors for the T&DI of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). He has 55 refereed articles in peer reviewed journals in the domains of transport planning, geography, economic, and policy, and recently edited Applications of Access.

Dr. Zan Gao is a professor at the School of Kinesiology in University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, specializing in physical activity and health. Dr. Gao’s research has primarily focused on promoting health through population-based physical activity interventions with emerging technologies such as active video games, virtual reality and health wearables. In the past decade, Dr. Gao has given 233 presentations at various international and national conferences. He has also published 3 books, 28 book chapters and 150 research articles in peer-reviewed journals such as British Journal of Sports Medicine and Obesity Review. Dr. Gao has been the recipient of several prestigious international and national awards and principal investigator of National Institute of Health research grants and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Grant. He also serves as a reviewer for numerous journals, and is currently the Editorial Board Member of Games for Health, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, BioMed Research International and Journal of Clinical Medicine, and Associate Editor for Journal of Health and Sports Science and Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sports. Dr. Gao’s google h-index is 43. He is the Fellow of American College of Sports Medicine, and the Fellow of SHAPE America! Research Council.

Kirti Vardhan Das is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Princeton University’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Urban Nexus Lab.

Das’s research interests include the impacts of urban planning practices and policy on public heath, urban sustainability, and equity. His current research investigates the influence of neighborhood infrastructure and the built environment on the subjective well-being of residents in cities across the United States and India. Additionally, he also works on food systems related projects focused urban agriculture to better understand the demographics of participants and benefits of growing your own food.

Das has an interdisciplinary education background. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree, a Master of Urban and Regional Planning degree, and a Ph.D. degree in Public Affairs. His past work experience includes working as an architect in India and as a research fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Julian is co-founder and Chief Innovation Officer of Daynamica, Inc., and an Associate Professor in the Division of Biostatistics at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. His research interests include causal inference, machine learning, and mobile health.

Jinwoo is a member of the Smart and Sustainable Construction (SSC) Research Group and HUman Bio-Behavioral Signals (HUBBS) Lab at Texas A&M University. His research interests include smart and sustainable built environments with crowdsourcing, wearable sensing, multimodal data, signal processing, geospatial intelligence, and artificial intelligence. His research has primarily focused on capturing the environmental distress of pedestrians using multimodal data, including bio-signals (e.g., electrodermal activity, heart rate, gait patterns) and image-based data (visual features captured from built environment images) for walkable built environments.

Andy is a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. His research interests include Machine Learning, Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA), Causal Inference, and Clustering. He has led two major studies featuring Daynamica, including one focused on assessing the impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on travel and activity behavior patterns.

Guang is co-founder of Daynamica, Inc. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Peking University (China) and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of North Carolina. Prior to joining Daynamica, he worked as Senior Project Engineer at Thermo Fisher Scientific for seven years. He has managed multiple R&D projects across all stages ranging from business proposal to product release and maintenance. These projects include next generation X-ray inspection platforms, high-speed online weighing systems, and high accuracy multi-frequency contaminant detection systems.

Chen-Fu is co-founder of Daynamica, Inc. His research focuses on using Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies to assist people with vision impairment in finding their way. Dr. Liao has developed a mobile accessible pedestrian signal (MAPS) system to assist the visually impaired with crossing streets at signalized intersections. He is also working on using assistive technologies to help the visually impaired safely navigate work zones and in GPS unfriendly environments. His other research activities include connected vehicles, incident decision support systems, database management and data mining, freight performance measures, and developing undergraduate and graduate curriculum tools to support transportation education and training.

Yingling is co-founder of Daynamica, Inc. and Professor of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Minnesota. She is the lead investigator of the five research projects that developed the Daynamica technology between 2011 and 2018. Using the Daynamica technology, she has pioneered the transportation happiness concept and developed systems to measure, analyze, and visualize individual- and population-level travel behavior and the associated emotional experiences. She received her Bachelor of Science in Transportation Engineering at Southeast University (China) and her Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning at the University of North Carolina. Her research has attracted more than $18 million in extramural research funding, including significant contributions from the U.S. Department of Transportation, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and multiple private foundations.