Yichun Fan

Yichun Fan is a PhD candidate in Urban Economics at MIT Department of Urban Studies & Planning and Center for Real Estate. She is also a graduate researcher at MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL). She received her Master in City Planning (Environmental Policy and Planning track) from MIT and Bachelor in Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University. 

Yichun conducts research in urban and environmental economics, blending methods from urban science, behavioral science, and computational social science. Her research studies urban adaptation to environmental risk. Her recent inquiries study how people and businesses in cities adapt to climate change and how to integrate behavioral knowledge to design more climate-resilient urban policies and built environments. Her work typically utilizes high-resolution urban big data coupled with computational methods and possesses a significant focus on protecting disadvantaged communities to achieve equitable resilience. She has published papers in journals like Nature Human Behavior, Nature Communications, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Research Letters, and Cities. You can find more information about her ongoing research projects on her personal website.