Ruoyu Chen

I am a computational social scientist, urban planner, and economic geographer. My work uses large-scale data to understand spatial inequality and human behavior in cities.

I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Planning and Development at USC Price School. My dissertation research tries to understand the inequality of mobility at the neighborhood level—both long-term residential mobility and short-term daily mobility—using large-scale consumer reference and mobile phone data. I am fortunate to be advised by Professors Marlon Boarnet, Jorge De la Roca, and Geoff Boeing.

My other projects examine the geography of vehicular emissions across U.S. neighborhoods, the impacts of electric vehicle adoption on congestion in California, and data-induced bias in urban accessibility analyses. I also contribute to the GOHSC on data and software development.

My findings have been published in Geographical Analysis, Transportation Research Part A, the Journal of Transport Geography, and the Journal of Urban Planning and Development. More about my research can be found here.

I hold an M.S. in Geography (Urban & Regional Planning) from PKU (北京大学) and a B.E. in Urban Planning with an Economics minor from HUST (华中科技大学). Prior to my Ph.D., I studied transportation policy and urban structure change in China using smartcard and mobile phone data. I also studied in Singapore and the Netherlands.

Pronunciation: “Ruoyu” (若宇 in Chinese) is pronounced as “Row-Yoo”.

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