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 global mobility system. He brings behavioral science and transportation technology together to shape travel behavior, design mobility system, and reform urban policies. He develops 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. 

Prof. Zhao founded and directs the MIT Mobility Initiative, coalescing the Institute’s efforts on transportation research, education, entrepreneurship, and civic engagement. He hosts the MIT Mobility Forum, curating cutting-edge transportation research across the globe. Prof. Zhao directs the JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab at MIT and leads long-term research collaborations with major transportation authorities and operators worldwide, including London, Chicago, Hong Kong, Washington D.C., and Singapore and enables cross-culture learning between cities in North America, Asia and Europe. He is the co-founder and chief scientist for TRAM Global, a mobility decarbonization venture. He very much enjoys working with students.