Meet the team
Qunshan Zhao
Professor Qunshan Zhao joined UBDC in May 2019. He is the Deputy Director of UBDC and a Professor in Urban Analytics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow. He holds both PhD and MA in Geography/GIScience from the Arizona State University in the USA and a BE in Remote Sensing, Photogrammetry, and GIS from the Wuhan University in China. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience (KER) and Spatial Analysis Research Centre (SPARC) at the Arizona State University.
Qunshan’s research has three main keywords, including Cities, Sensors, and Data. His research interest focuses on creating a sustainable urban future and tackling related social, economic, and environmental problems by using new forms of data and related analytical approaches including GIScience (geographic information systems, remote sensing, and spatial analysis), machine learning/deep learning/foundational models, operations research, sensor networks, and urban climate modelling and instrumentation. Ongoing research efforts include urban infrastructure location optimization (urban green infrastructure; bike sharing station; alternative refuelling stations location modelling), human-environment interactions (human mobility patterns in urban/natural spaces, particularly by mobile phone app data), housing energy efficiency and fuel poverty (fuel poverty and housing environment sensing and evaluation), 3D city modelling, urban slum modeling in Global South, and open source spatial optimization methods development (pysal/spopt).
Qunshan’s dissertation received the J. Warren Nystrom Award from the American Association of Geographers as one of the most outstanding research papers, based upon a recent dissertation in 2018. In 2026, he received the Young Scholar Award from the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences (CPGIS), which recognises young ‘rising stars’ for their research contributions to Geographic Information Science and Technology.
He has served as the Board of Director of CPGIS since 2026, Secretary of Quantitative Methods Research Group at RGS-IBG from 2021-25, and the Board Member of Spatial Analysis and Modeling Specialty Group at AAG from 2018-2021. He has been the Grant Assessment Panel of the ESRC-SDAI programme, UKSA-NSIP programme, and ESRC SDRUK Fellowship programme, and serves as the Series Advisory Editors for the Urban Book Series at Springer. He also serves as the programme chair/co-chair/committee member to help organise and host multiple major international academic conferences in the UK including GISRUK 2023 (Glasgow), CPGIS 2023 (London), GIScience 2023 (Leeds), AGILE 2024 (Glasgow), and the Alan Turing Institute Urban Analytics Programme Event 2024 (Glasgow).
Positions
Professor in Urban Analytics
Publication links
Publications
Transportation and process modelling-assisted techno-economic assessment of resource recovery from non-recycled municipal plastic waste.
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Integrated geospatial methods for multilingual cities: Combining GPS, electronically activated recorder, and map-based ethnographic interviews.
Did the implementation of the low emission zone in Glasgow change the traffic flow and air quality?
Understanding urban traffic flows in response to COVID-19 pandemic with emerging urban big data in Glasgow.
A long-term (1984–2021) wetland classification dataset for the Yangtze River Basin from continuous Landsat image collections.
Comparing carbon-saving potential of the pyrolysis of non-recycled municipal plastic waste: Influences of system scales and end products.
Investigating the Impact of Housing Energy Efficiency on Indoor Environment at the Overheating Summer – A Study in Southwark, London.
Understanding the interaction between human activities and physical health under extreme heat environment in Phoenix, Arizona.
Analysis The Influencing Factors of Urban Traffic Flows by Using Emerging Urban Big Data.
Understanding the spatial heterogeneity of COVID-19 vaccination uptake in England.
Developing Capacitated p-median Location-allocation Model in the spopt Library to Allow UCL Student Teacher Placements Using Public Transport.
Enhanced crop classification through integrated optical and SAR data: a deep learning approach for multi-source image fusion.
12th International Conference on Geographic Information Science: GIScience 2023, September 12–15, 2023, Leeds, UK.
Quantifying the cumulative cooling effects of 3D building and tree shades with high resolution thermal imagery in a hot arid urban climate.
Identifying Tree Preservation Order Protected Trees by Deep Learning in Greater London Area.
Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation of Airborne LiDAR Point Clouds in Hong Kong Urban Areas.
Understanding the Complex Behaviours of Electric Vehicle Drivers with Agent-Based Models in Glasgow.
Estimating Greenspace Visitation Using Digital Footprints Data: A Collaboration with Glasgow City Council to Aid in Open Space Policy and Operations [poster]
Assessing the socio-demographic representativeness of mobile phone application data.
Identifying locations for new bike-sharing stations in Glasgow: an analysis of spatial equity and demand factors.
Drivers of prohibited natural resource collection in Chitwan National Park, Nepal.
Modelling the COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake Rates in a Geographical and Socioeconomic Context: A Case Study of England.
Analysis the Influencing Factors of Urban Traffic Flows by Using New and Emerging Urban Big Data and Deep Learning.
Understanding building energy efficiency with administrative and emerging urban big data by deep learning in Glasgow.
Understanding the Socio-demographic Representation of Tamoco Mobile Phone App Data in Glasgow City Region.
Optimization of residential green space for environmental sustainability and property appreciation in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona.
Observing the impact of urban morphology and building geometry on thermal environment by high spatial resolution thermal images.
Understanding the Use of Greenspace Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic by Using Mobile Phone App Data.
Citizen mobility and the growth of infections during the COVID-19 pandemic with the effects of government restrictions in Western Europe.
Editorial for special issue: “Remote Sensing of Urban Ecology and Sustainability”
A geographically weighted regression approach to understanding urbanization impacts on urban warming and cooling: a case study of Las Vegas.
Articulating strategies to address heat resilience using spatial optimization and temporal analysis of utility assistance data of the Salvation Army Metro Phoenix.
Green vegetation cover has steadily increased since establishment of community forests in Western Chitwan, Nepal.
Optimizing and Rebalancing Heat-related Utility Assistance Provider-client System of the Salvation Army in Phoenix, Arizona.
Community Resilience in Maricopa County, Arizona, USA: The Analysis of Indoor Heat-Related Death and Urban Thermal Environment.
Impacts of spatial clustering of urban land cover on land surface temperature across Köppen climate zones in the contiguous United States.
A multi-scale framework for fuel station location: from highways to street intersections.
Assessing the cooling benefits of tree shade by an outdoor urban physical scale model at Tempe, AZ.
Impact of tree locations and arrangements on outdoor microclimates and human thermal comfort in an urban residential environment.
Examining healthy food accessibility and disparity in Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Comparing paper and tablet modes of retrospective activity space data collection.
Semi-Parametric Geographically Weighted Regression (S-GWR): a Case Study on Invasive Plant Species Distribution in Subtropical Nepal.
A MODIS/ASTER airborne simulator (MASTER) imagery for urban heat island research.
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Jointly funded by
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