About me
My name is Rongxiang Su (pronounced as Rong-sheeyang) (he/him), and I am a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Before joining UIUC, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab from 2024 to 2025. I hold a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
My research interests lie in geospatial data science, human mobility, travel behavior, and urban analytics. Broadly, my work seeks to understand human mobility, travel behavior, and activity patterns in urban systems by analyzing human-generated data sources such as mobile phone traces, household travel surveys, and food delivery transactions. I am particularly interested in developing computational methods to identify and quantify the spatiotemporal dynamics of daily activities and interactions. In parallel, I aim to examine disparities in human behavior by modeling and predicting activity-travel patterns across diverse socio-geographic contexts—ultimately contributing to more sustainable, equitable, and inclusive transportation systems and access to urban opportunities.
To date, I have published 21 peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, or conference proceedings (12 first-author journal articles) in GIScience and transportation and beyond (e.g., ecology and social sciences). Many of these appear in prestigious journals such as Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Journal of Geographical Systems, Journal of Transport Geography, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Transactions in GIS, and Movement Ecology. In addition to my research, I serve as a peer reviewer for more than 30 academic journals and conferences. I am always enthusiastic about discussing research and potential collaborations. Feel free to email me at rsu at illinois dot edu!
Education
- PhD in Geography, University of California Santa Barbara, 2023
- Dissertation: Sensing Human Activity and Interaction Patterns through Movement Observations
- Co-chairs: Konstadinos Goulias, Somayeh Dodge
- M.S. in Cartography and Geographic Information System, Wuhan University, China, 2019
- B.S. in Geographic Information System, Hefei University of Technology, China, 2016
Honors and Awards
- Outstanding Dissertation Award, AAG Transportation Geography Specialty Group, 2025
- Honorable mention for 2023 Eric Pas Dissertation Prize, International Association for Travel Behaviour Research, 2025
- AAG-GISS Student Paper Competition Honorable Mention Award, 2023
- Jack and Laura Dangermond Fellowship, 2022
- Geography Department Excellence in Research Award, UCSB, 2022
- Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Students Abroad, 2022
- Chinese-American Engineers and Scientists Association of Southern California Scholarship, 2022
- Best paper award, 1st ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Animal Movement Ecology and Human Mobility, Beijing, China (online), 2022
Peer reviewer for
- Geography and GIS: International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Transactions in GIS, Journal of Transport Geography, GIScience\&Remote Sensing, Journal of Spatial Information Science
- Transportation: Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, Travel Behaviour and Society, Transportation, European Journal of Transport and Infrastructure Research, Public Transport, Transportation Letters, Transportation Research Record, Data Science for Transportation, npj Sustainable Mobility and Transport, Transportation Planning and Technology, Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, World Transport Convention
- Multidisciplinary: Nature Human Behaviour, Scientific Reports, IEEE Access, International Journal of Data Science and Analytics, Plos One
- Other: Applied Energy, Computational Urban Science, Applied Network Science, Journal of Happiness Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications