Cynthia Chen is a professor in the Departments of Civil & Environmental Engineering and Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and a member of the Washington State Academy of Sciences. An internationally recognized leader in transportation science, she directs the THINK (Transportation–Human Interaction and Network Knowledge) Lab at UW. Her research tackles some of the most pressing challenges in mobility and resilience: uncovering biases in big data, developing innovative methods to fuse large-scale and small-scale data sources, modeling mobility behaviors of individuals and cascading processes in networks, and designing interventions that promote healthier, more resilient communities through routine-aware personalized recommendations and place-based peer-to-peer sharing.Prof. Chen’s scholarship is widely published in top journals across transportation systems engineering, travel behavior, land use planning, and interdisciplinary venues such as PNAS and Nature Cities. Her work has been supported by numerous federal, state, and local agencies. Currently, she serves as Associate Director of the USDOT-funded National Center for Understanding Future Travel Behavior and Demand (led by UT Austin) and as an Associate Editor for Transportation Science.Through the THINK Lab, Prof. Chen continues to push the boundaries of how we understand human mobility, networks, and resilience in the face of social and environmental change. More about her work can be found at https://sites.uw.edu/thinklab.

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