Cynthia Chen

I direct the THINK (Transportation-Human Interaction-and- Network Knowledge) Lab (http://depts.washington.edu/thinklab). The THINK lab studies the sustainability and resilience of a city through the lens of human beings interacting with the physical environment. We generate new knowledge and insights for use in city planning, infrastructure development and policy design. More specifically, THINK lab’s research activities center on unpacking the complexities across scales, from micro-level individual mobility behaviors, to meso-level social tie networks formed as the result of space and time-based individual behaviors, and macro-level system behaviors that propagate through multiple networks.

I am currently a MPI on a NIIH funded R01 project (3-population 3-scale social network model to assess disease dispersion). In the project, we develop individual mobility trajectories from a mass amount of data, on which social networks are established and flu spreading patterns are simulated.