Greetings! I’m Songhua Hu (胡松华), an Assistant Professor of Transportation Engineering at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering, City University of Hong Kong. Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at MIT Senseable City Lab. I received my Ph.D. (2023) from the University of Maryland, College Park, M.S. (2019) from Tongji University (同济大学), and B.S. (2016) from Huazhong University of Science and Technology (华中科技大学).
My research leverages crowdsourced data mining, spatiotemporal AI, network analysis, and advanced statistics to advance smart, sustainable, resilient, and equitable mobility systems. I have published over 40 journal papers (21 first-authored) in Nature Sustainability, PNAS, Transportation Research Part A/C/D/E, etc., and have contributed to research projects funded by USDOT, NIH, NSF, FHWA, and USDOE. I serve as a reviewer for over 60 journals including Nature Cities, Nature Communications, Transportation Research Part A-E, among others.
News
- [04/2026] Our research featured on MIT NEWS and Anthropocene!
- [04/2026] New paper in Nature Sustainability! See the visualization HERE.
- [09/2025] Joined CityUHK as a tenure-track Assistant Professor!
- [05/2025] Invited job talk at UCL CEGE on Agentic AI in Human Mobility Simulation!
- [02/2025] Invited job talk at Princeton University ACEE!
- [01/2025] Invited job talk at University of Alberta CEE!
- [10/2023] Received COTA Best Dissertation Award!
- [05/2023] Received UMD CEE Best Doctoral Research Award!
Publications
Over 40 journal papers (21 First-Author, 4 Corresponding) including Nature Sustainability (1, 1F 1C), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1), TR Part A (5, 3F), TR Part C (5, 3F), TR Part D (3, 3F), TR Part E (1), Computers, Environment and Urban Systems (3, 1F), Journal of Transport Geography (3, 2F), Cities (1, 1F), Sustainable Cities and Society (1, 1F), Journal of the Royal Society Interface (1), Journal of Planning Education and Research (1), among others. >30 presentations at TRB, IEEE ITSC, NetMob, INFORMS, AGU, etc.
Research Topics
Each panel below highlights a set of dominant themes varying by year. Themes are AI-synthesized by reading my papers from (OpenAlex). A single thread runs through all periods: turning ubiquitous urban data into actionable insights for smart, sustainable, and resilient mobility. The main topics change over time, from operator-scale shared mobility at Tongji, to nationwide pandemic-era mobility at UMD, to citywide emission inventories and crowdsourced public sensing at MIT.
Selected Papers
Ubiquitous data-driven framework for traffic emission estimation and policy evaluation
Mobile device data reveal the dynamics in a positive relationship between human mobility and COVID-19 infections
Evaluating the impact of zone 30 policies on citywide road traffic emissions and efficiency: A big data-driven approach
High-dimensional population inflow time series forecasting via an interpretable hierarchical transformer
A full pipeline that turns raw mobile device data into multi-modal OD matrices