Welcome!

Hi, my name is Luyu Liu (he/his/him); the pronunciation is “Loo-yu Li-eu” (listen in Google Translate). Please call me Luyu, even if you are my students! I lead the EcoTrans Lab at Auburn, and I am actively recruiting PhD and Master’s students and Posdocs, please feel free to send me your CV if you are interested!

I am a Assistant Professor at the Department of Geosciences at Auburn University. I received my PhD in Geographic Information Science from the Department of Geography at the Ohio State University. I identify myself as a transportation geographer, a mobility data scientist, and a GISer.

Research Interests

My research goals are to promote sustainable and resilient mobility from a social equity perspective. Empirically, my interests are urban transport geography, primarily in public transport and micromobility. The core of my research questions is to mitigate and overcome car dependency in cities and to promote sustainability, accessibility, and social equity. Several problems I am interested in:

• How to overcome car dependency in car-oriented cities?
• How does climate change impact public transit and transit users?
• How to improve accessibility and equity in transportation?

Methodology

My primary solutions are GIS and urban computing techniques; I also used statistics and geostatistics. I believe in data-driven approach and Occam’s razor; I developed a dissertation on how to advance mobility and accessibility research with real-time high-resolution data, which are naturally of much larger volume and more heterogeneity.

I am also a keen supporter of web-based GIS for its convenient, accessible, and open-source friendly nature. I love making accessible and innovative web-maps in different contexts.

Beyond research

I love good humor, different subcultures, and Wikipedia. My recent obsessions are Bloodborne and 2010s songs adapted to 1980s style.

I love making friends so feel free to email me anytime, always glad to chat!