Dr. Yujie Hu
Pronouns: he/him
University of Florida
Focus Areas:
Research Statement: I am a geographer with research and teaching interests in urban transportation, human mobility, and accessibility. My current research focuses on three main areas: 1) relationships between people’s mobility within cities—including commuting, healthcare-seeking, and crime—and the urban built environment, 2) accessibility to opportunities, such as jobs, healthcare, food, and transportation infrastructure, and how it is affected by natural hazards, and, 3) network flow analysis and optimization of travel patterns related to commuting, bike sharing, healthcare, and food delivery.
My main research approach is the development and application of GIS, spatial analysis, and network analysis techniques to reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors from big geospatial data associated with point patterns (traffic crashes, crime incidents) and networks (movement trajectory such as taxi cab GPS trajectory, smart card transaction data, and origin-destination flow such as commuting, bike sharing usage, and inpatient discharge). The goal is to convert data into knowledge to inform and evaluate place-based policies focused on transportation, land use, public health, and community safety.
Hermann Park off Rice campus
Who is he?
Dr. Yujie Hu is an Assistant Professor in the Geography Department. He conducts interdisciplinary geospatial research and has worked with researchers in civil engineering, urban planning, computer science, statistics, economics, industrial engineering, political science, public health, environmental science and policy, and sociology – he welcomes researchers and students from these fields for collaborative research.
Yujie is also affiliated with the UF Informatics Institute and UF Transportation Institute, and is a Fellow with the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Prior to his current position, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of South Florida and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Rice University. Yujie grew up in Yantai, China, a beautiful beach city where the Chinese national rail line terminates at a major port.
How did he get here?
Growing up in Yantai, Yujie benefited from excellent bicycle infrastructure. Despite heavy snow in the winter, it’s a great location for year-round bike riding – with low humidity and wide, safe bike lanes. Riding around Yantai, Yujie found himself wondering why roads are where they are and how planners make the location decisions – he started to bike or walk randomly on the road just to explore every corner of the city. “When you’re driving you don’t stop so you can’t look at things,’ he says. “When you’re biking and walking, you have the time to stop and look at the world around you.”
During his Master’s work, Yujie studied spatial patterns of road networks – asking what was present on the roads and analyzing road network structures. While earning his PhD in Geography at Louisiana State University, he explored commuting, travel behavior, healthcare seeking, and crime – adding movement to his work and asking how people use the roads that are present.
Yujie studies and understands spatial questions through applied studies. Using geospatial methods and techniques, he finds interesting problems and patterns, proposes mitigations, and then offers suggested courses of action.
Yujie likes being a researcher because he can associate his questions with his personal interests like biking and transit. While a postdoctoral fellow at Rice University, he found Houston to be inhospitable to bicyclists and pedestrians. He identified and studied some particularly bad intersections and ultimately published a journal article Where are the Dangerous Intersections for Pedestrians and Cyclists: A Colocation-Based Approach in 2018. “To make things change, you have to get people’s attention and get them talking,” said Yujie. This work didn’t just yield a publication. Yujie was able to advocate for active transportation and safety – not just for vehicles but other kinds of road users – when he was interviewed by local TV stations in Houston, met with the Houston Police Department who analyze accidents and crashes, and engineers from the Department of Public Works.
What’s he been doing at UF?
Since joining the department in the Fall of 2019, Yujie has been keeping very busy. He has redesigned and taught GIS4113: Introduction to Spatial Networks, GIS6104: Spatial Networks, GEO3602: Urban and Business Geography, and has been developing GEO 4938/6938 Transportation Geography for Fall semester.
In addition to his teaching duties, Yujie has published 5 papers since joining the department: Impact of Coastal Hazards on Residents’ Spatial Accessibility to Health Services, Accessibility and Transportation Equity, Estimating a large drive time matrix between ZIP codes in the United States: A differential sampling approach, Estimating road network accessibility during a hurricane evacuation: A case study of hurricane Irma in Florida, and Automated delineation of cancer service areas in northeast region of the United States: A network optimization approach. Currently he has a publication on food deserts offering a proposed solution to food insecurity for low income and socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods in review.
Yujie has served as Guest Editor of the Accessibility and Transportation Equity special issue in Sustainability, serves on the Editorial Board of Southeastern Geographer, and is a Board Member of the Transportation Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers.
Additionally, Yujie has received the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) and won UFII COVID-19 Response SEED Funding for his project Socioeconomic Impacts of COVID-19: A Criminological Perspective (he’s hiring research assistants)
Finally, Yujie has been starting a lab – the Geospatial Network Analysis and Visualization Lab (GeoNAVI) and is preparing to welcome his new grad students in the fall.
How has he been holding up during the pandemic?
Although things may have been quiet on campus, Yujie has been busy with defenses and exams – he is a committee member on 2 PhD committees at LSU’s Geography & Anthropology Department – both students advanced to become PhD candidates. He’s also a committee member on 2 PhD dissertation defenses at USF – one in School of Geosciences and the other in the Department of Industrial and Management Systems Engineering – both students passed and earned their PhD!
Yujie has also been keeping busy at home. His children would really like their parents to stop working and play all day. So he has been trying hard to think of fun activities they can do together both inside and outside.
Sadly, Yujie left his beloved bicycle in his campus office when the lockdown happened, so he hasn’t been able to explore Gainesville from the back of a bike. He’s looking forward to reuniting with his bike and playing basketball, once that’s an option again.
College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Follow Yujie on Twitter
Credit: Mike Ryan Simonovich