Yilun 'Elon' Zha is a planner, urban designer, and data scientist. As a Ph.D. student in urban design and Master’s student in statistics, Elon orients his research interest towards the quantitative analysis of urban (re)design and its role in environmental, economic, and social sustainability. His past experience includes a wide variety of urban design and planning practices in China and the United States. Currently, he is working with Professor Ellen Dunham-Jones on research exploring the strategies and unintended consequences of suburban retrofits. Prior to joining Georgia Tech, he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees in City Planning from Tongji University in 2016 and 2019, respectively. In 2018, he also obtained a double Master's degree of Urban Design from Georgia Tech.

Advisor: Ellen Dunham-Jones

Meaghan McSorley is a Ph.D. student in the School of City and Regional Planning at Georgia Tech and a research assistant in the Healthy Places Lab with Dr. Nisha Botchwey, and the Smart Sea Level Sensors (SSLS) project based in Savannah, GA. She is also a Georgia Tech Institute Fellow. Her research focuses on the “people side” of sustainability, and the question of how to plan for healthy, equitable, and thriving cities for all. Specifically, she is interested in the role of culture, history, and emotions in helping to develop just approaches to climate change issues that center on the margins and create space for imagining thriving futures. Prior to returning to graduate school, she also worked at an electronic medical records software company for four years in a variety of implementation and management roles. She holds degrees in urban & regional planning (MURP) and public health (MPH), both from the University of Minnesota; and in anthropology and French (BA) from Cornell University.

Advisor: Nisha Botchwey

Perry Yang is a Professor and Director of Eco Urban Lab of the School of City and Regional Planning and the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Perry’s work focuses on incorporating data analytics into urban design to improve ecological and energy performance of cities. He has published more than fifty articles and book chapters in this area from 2009, including the book Urban Systems Design: Creating Sustainable Smart Cities in the Internet of Things Era that he co-edited and co-authored six chapters in 2020 by Elsevier. He co-edited a 2019 theme issue Urban Systems Design: From Science for Design to Design in Science in Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, a prestigious journal in planning to explore new urban design research agenda and applications of emerging technologies, data analytics and urban automation to placemaking in the context of smart city movement. Beyond writing, Yang has been awarded more than ten prizes in international competitions continuously from 2005 in Asian cities, including the 2009 World Games Park at Kaohsiung, Taiwan, a project opened in July 2009 and featured by CNN as an “eco-friendly” venue. His urban design work was introduced in the January 2010 issue Ecological Urbanism at World Architecture (WA), a leading architecture journal by Tsinghua University. His recent design projects were shortlisted in the 2022 Asian Games Village in Hangzhou in 2017, the Musi River Revitalization at Hyderabad in 2018, and water town designs in China’s Yangtze River Delta region in 2020-2021 during the pandemic. From 2017 to 2023, he has been involved in smart city projects in Japan, including one of Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic sites at Urawa Misono, in collaboration with the University of Tokyo, Keio University and Global Carbon Project (GCP). 

Yang is a Visiting Professor at the Department of Urban Engineering of the University of Tokyo from 2022 to 2023, and a Visiting Scientist at CARES of the Cambridge University in Singapore in 2023. He served as the endowed Bayer Chair Professor of UNEP Institute at Tongji University from 2014 to 2018. Perry is also a faculty fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems at Georgia Tech from 2018. He has served as a board member of the International Urban Planning and Environment Association (UPE) from 2007. He is a scientific committee member of International Conference on Applied Energy (ICAE) from 2015. Prior to joining the Georgia Tech faculty, he was a Fulbright Scholar and SPURS Fellow at MIT from 1999 to 2000, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the National University of Singapore from 2001 to 2008.