Yan Wang

Dr. Yan Wang is an Associate Professor at the Department of Urban & Regional Planning in College of Design, Construction and Planning, University of Florida. She is a founding faculty member for the Florida Institute for Built Environment Resilience (FIBER) and the founder and director of the Urban Agility and Resilience Lab. Her research focuses on developing and applying computational tools to quantity and manage urban resilience in response to disruptions, including hazards and emerging technologies. Over the past decade, Dr. Wang’s has made contributions to answer (i) how resilience can be measured, explained, and enhanced within built communities and (ii) how to achieve information agility and integrity in digital environments. Her pioneering work explores the intersection of urban resilience and urban analytics, particularly the roles of spatial planning and crisis informatics. Recognized as the top-ranked female scholars in urban analytics globally, Dr. Wang has authored over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers (Google Scholar) and has secured more than $3 million in research funding, including eight prestigious federal awards from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

 

Prior to UF, Dr. Wang earned her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech. She also holds a master’s degree in asset valuation (BJTU) and a bachelor’s degree in construction engineering and management (BJTU) from the school of economics and management. She is the recipient of NSF CAREER Award (2025), UF Excellence Awards for Assistant Professors (2022), UF Global Research Fellow (2018), Weather Ready Research Fellowships (Natural Hazard Center, 2021), Mitigation Matters Award (Natural Hazard Center, 2020), ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering Accolade Best Paper Award (2021), UF Research Promotion Initiative Award (2021), UF Great Teaching Certificate (2021), DCP Excellence in Research Award (2021) and Virginia Tech IGEP BioBuild Fellowship (2015-2018).

 

Her teaching efforts primarily contribute to tailored pedagogies and contextualized curricula for urban analytics within planning programs, particularly for the Urban Analytics Program within the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She has served on the editorial board of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering since 2020 and is the Guest Editor for the Journal of Planning Education and Research’s special issue on AI and Urban Planning (2024-2027).