Teaching, Mentoring, and Diversity

Teaching: I like teaching and consider it as an essential part of my academic life. Effective teaching, in my view, relies on thorough pre-class preparation, open in-class environment, and active post-class interaction. Moreover, it’s equally crucial to recognize the diversity of student backgrounds and encourage flexible engagement. I am well-prepared to teach both undergraduate and graduate courses in transportation, GIS, and urban informatics. I’m also eager to develop new courses that combine my research with foundational transportation and GIS theories.

Student Mentoring: Since graduate school, I have assisted my advisors in mentoring undergraduate, graduate, and high school students. We work together on different research projects, some of which have been published in top-tier journals. Now, as a postdoc at MIT, I lead multiple teams through MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, where I guide students from diverse fields like computer science, EECS, AI, CEE, and urban planning to work on various projects.

Outreach: I’ve been serving as an online technology blogger since 2016, sharing software and modeling skills related to GIS data mining and traffic simulation (Vissim, TransCAD, AnyLogic, and DTALite). With over 2 million visits and 6,400+ dedicated followers, my goal is to make professional knowledge readily available to anyone interested in our field.