Jinhua Zhao MCP ’04, SM ’04, PhD ’09 has been appointed head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), effective July 1. Zhao is the Class of 1941 Professor of Cities and Transportation at MIT.
In making the announcement, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning Hashim Sarkis noted that Zhao is a renowned transportation planner, educator, and scholar, and a world leader in imagining and shaping higher futures for mobility.
“Jinhua is one in all those rare scholars who moves seamlessly between cutting-edge research and real-world policy,” says Sarkis. “His work with governments and transportation agencies world wide is a model for what MIT’s impact can seem like beyond our campus.”
Zhao succeeds Professor Christopher Zegras, who has served as department head since 2020. Under his leadership, DUSP expanded opportunities for college kids to interact directly with communities and policymakers world wide and continued to strengthen its long-standing connection between research and practice. “I need to increase my gratitude to Chris Zegras for his excellent and grounded leadership, especially in difficult times,” says Sarkis.
After earning advanced degrees at MIT, Zhao joined the DUSP faculty. He says he found the Institute’s lack of conventionality and its culture of sharing ideas across disciplines stimulating.
“MIT is a small school in the best sense of the word,” says Zhao. “Now we have fewer boundaries than other universities — intellectually and physically. Our ‘infinite corridor’ literally connects us to so many disciplines.”
Shaping mobility systems worldwide
That connectivity has been key for Zhao’s research and programs he has founded at MIT. Respected as a worldwide authority on mobility, his research has been put into practice across a number of the world’s most complex mobility challenges. He and his team have shaped policy for Transport for London, the Mass Transit Railway in Hong Kong, and Japan Railways. His research has positively impacted leading U.S. transit authorities including Boston’s MBTA, the Chicago Transit Authority, and Washington’s Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. He has guided strategic planning for mobility industry on the longer term of autonomous and digital mobility, and developed autonomous vehicle (AV) deployment strategy in Singapore and the Middle East.
“Every city I’ve worked with faces the identical tension: The technology is moving faster than the institutions designed to manipulate it,” says Zhao. “My work has been about closing that gap.”
At MIT, Zhao founded the MIT Mobility Initiative, which engages mobility and transportation researchers across the Institute in addition to leaders in these disciplines from world wide. Zhao hosts the weekly MIT Mobility Forum via Zoom, with each discussion open to the general public. What began as a small internal list of participants has grown into a worldwide platform, drawing greater than 200 practitioners, policymakers, and researchers every week world wide. The sizeable interest in the topic doesn’t surprise Zhao.
“No single discipline owns transportation,” says Zhao. “AI and autonomous systems are reshaping urban living faster than most institutions can adapt. The query isn’t any longer what we all know. It is whether or not the individuals who need it most — municipal governments, transport agencies, federal ministries — can access it once they make decisions on transportation. Because of this the forum exists.”
Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab that unites behavioral science and transportation technology to shape travel behavior, design mobility systems, and improve transportation policies. He can be a lead principal investigator with Mens, Manus, and Machina, an MIT initiative on the intersection of artificial intelligence, the longer term of labor, and human learning, developing the tools and methods for the way cities, institutions, and economies might be designed to make sure AI augments, relatively than displaces, the people inside them.
DUSP’s global agenda
“For those who take a look at the worldwide agenda, what are the problems persons are facing?” asks Zhao. “An aging society; AI and its impact on jobs; the energy crisis; traffic congestion. These are only a number of the problems people feel connected to because they’re embodied in our cities and communities. I need DUSP to interact with the city leaders and share our research and insights.”
As he prepares to step into his role as department head, Zhao says he would really like the research generated inside DUSP to more quickly reach those that need it most: the planners, officials, and engineers making decisions in cities immediately. A transit authority grappling with AV integration; a city government rethinking aging infrastructure; a number one transport ministry navigating the policy implications of AI — these are the constituencies Zhao believes DUSP ought to be in energetic conversation with.
“We all know a fantastic deal about how cities grow, how people move, and the way that may change. The query is whether or not the people chargeable for making these changes — in city halls, transport agencies, federal ministries — can access what we all know, once they need it.”