In 2012, Yongqiu Zhu received a Bachelor degree in Traffic Transportation from Southwest Jiaotong University (China). Later in 2015, she received a Master degree in Traffic Transportation Planning and management from the same university. After a few months of visiting research at Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands),  Yongqiu started her PhD study in 2016 at the Department of Transport and Planning at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands). In December 2019, she defended her PhD thesis "Passenger-Oriented Timetable Rescheduling in Railway Disruption Management ",  which is under the supervision of Prof. Rob M.P. Goverde.  

After PhD, Yongqiu became a postdoc researcher at TU Delft and TU Denmark, respectively. During these positions, she explored new research directions on resilient railways towards extreme weather, reinforcement learning in railway traffic management, and multimodal transportation. In December 2020, she got the ETH Zurich Postdoctoral Fellowship, which supported her in further exploring the potential of AI techniques in passenger-oriented traffic management and smart information provisions under the supervision of Prof. Francesco Corman. 

Since August 2023, Yongqiu has worked at TU Delft as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Transport and Planning. In this position, she aims to address the challenges of uncertainty and scalability in (real-time) user-centric decision-making problems within passenger transport systems, leveraging reinforcement learning, data-driven approaches, optimization, simulation and heuristics. A particular focus is on public transport and its coordination with other emerging urban mobility, to withstand, respond, and adapt to the (unexpected) abnormal operational situations, including traffic disturbances, overcrowding, and disruptions.

Last update: 19-03-2024