Interests: Walking, active transportation, physical activity and built environment, walkability modeling
Yingying Lu is a doctoral graduate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work covers the research and design of healthy and environmental friendly buildings and urban spaces. Her current research focuses on active transportation including walking and cycling and their correlations with built and social environment. The ultimate goal is to identify ways in which urban planners, designers and policymakers can facilitate active transportation for the sake of the individuals’ health and the overall social benefits. She participated in the Health and Places Initiative Neighborhoods Research led by Professor Ann Forsyth and Professor Peter Rowe, and contributed to the book China’s Urban Communities from 2013 to 2014. She also worked as a Research Associate in Professor Peter Rowe’s Lab from 2013 to 2014, exploring techniques on the spatial analysis of urban formation, temporal and spatial shifts in population and transportation accessibility, and environmental analysis as well. Additionally, she co-founded the Harvard East Asia Urban Forum (EAU) in 2013 and has been the president of EAU since 2013, which is an academic platform inviting distinguished scholars, professionals and entrepreneurs to discuss urban issues and facilitating collaborations between academic and practice fields.
She studied in the GSD’s MDes program with a concentration in Energy and Environments from 2011 to 2013. Before coming to Harvard, she received her Master of Engineering from Tsinghua University in China. Courses focused on architecture and urban planning. Her thesis “Study on Passive Strategies in the Green Design of ‘Western New City’ Service Center in Tianjin” was awarded Outstanding Master’s Thesis of Tsinghua University in 2010. She received her Bachelor of Engineering from North China University of Technology majoring in Electrical Engineering. She worked at Tsinghua Urban Planning and Design Institute, COX Architecture and Chinese Academy of Science Institute of Automation in Beijing.