Jinhua Zhao

Jinhua Zhao is the Professor of City and Transportation Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Prof. Zhao integrates behavioral and computational thinking to decarbonize the world's mobility system.

Prof. Zhao founded the MIT Mobility Initiative, coalescing the Institute’s efforts on transportation research, education, entrepreneurship, and engagement. He hosts the MIT Mobility Forum, highlighting transportation innovation from MIT and across the globe. 

Prof. Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab, leading long-term collaborations with transportation authorities and operators worldwide and enabling cross-culture learning between cities in North America, Asia and Europe. 

Prof. Zhao leads the program “Mens, Manus and Machina (M3S): How AI Impacts the Future of Work and Future of Learning” at the Singapore MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

He is the co-founder and chief scientist for TRAM.Global, a mobility decarbonization venture. He very much enjoys working with students.  

Research interest

He brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility system, and reform urban policies. He develops computational methods to sense, predict, nudge, and regulate travel behavior and designs multimodal mobility systems that integrate automated and shared mobility with public transport. He sees transportation as a language to describe a person, characterize a city, and understand an institution and aims to establish the behavioral foundation for transportation systems and policies.