A passionate group of researchers building the scientific foundations of Disaster AI — working across foundation models, geospatial reasoning, agentic systems, and the hazard domains that matter most.
Director
Prof. Ali Mostafavi
Director, Principal Investigator
Dr. Ali Mostafavi is the Director of the UrbanResilience.AI Lab, a Zachry Endowed Professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the Director of Disaster AI at the Institute for a Disaster Resilient Texas (IDRT). His research pushes the frontiers of artificial intelligence to solve disaster resilience challenges. His lab works at the leading edge of Disaster AI — developing large language models, vision-language models, foundation models, and agentic AI systems that strengthen how communities anticipate, respond to, and recover from disasters, with published advances in disaster question answering and benchmarking, AI-based flood and damage assessment, and AI-driven decision support for emergency management. At Texas A&M, he is a fellow of the Institute for Science, Technology, and Public Policy and the Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. His honors include the ASCE Walter L. Huber Civil Engineering Research Prize, the ASCE Daniel W. Halpin Award for Scholarship in Construction, an NSF CAREER Award, and an Early-Career Research Fellowship from the National Academies’ Gulf Research Program. He is a member of the ASCE Infrastructure Resilience Division and an Editorial Board member of the ASCE Journal of Management in Engineering.
Post-doctoral Researchers
Bo Li
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Bo is a postdoctoral research associate in the UrbanResilience.AI Lab. She received her Ph.D. in civil engineering from Texas A&M University, her master’s degree in Management Science & Engineering from Tianjin University, and her bachelor’s degree in Construction Engineering & Management from Southeast University. Her research interests lie in data science and infrastructure resilience. She hopes to serve decision makers and residents and be a part of creating a better, safer world through her research. In her spare time, Bo enjoys playing badminton and reading.
Data ScienceInfrastructure Resilience
Chenyue Liu
Postdoctoral Research Data Scientist
Chenyue is a postdoctoral research data scientist in the UrbanResilience.AI Lab. She received her Ph.D. from Texas A&M University, her master’s degree in Quantitative Economics from Texas A&M University, and her bachelor’s degree in Statistics from Capital University of Economics and Business. Her research focuses on statistics and machine learning for complex urban challenges. Chenyue is an accomplished badminton player — she won first place in women’s doubles and mixed doubles at Texas A&M University.
Machine LearningUrban Analytics
Visiting & Affiliated Researchers
Junwei Ma
Affiliate Research Scientist
Junwei is an affiliate research scientist collaborating with the UrbanResilience.AI Lab on disaster AI research.
Disaster AI
Yibo Song
Visiting Research Intern
Yibo joined the UrbanResilience.AI Lab in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University as a research intern. He is currently a master’s student at ESTP in France, with a multidisciplinary background spanning civil engineering, project management, and GIS. He is interested in researching urban resilience and hazard risk analysis, combining geospatial data science with engineering methods. In his free time, he enjoys watching NBA games and analyzing films.
GISHazard Risk Analysis
PhD Students
Yu-Hsuan (Viola) Ho
PhD Student
Yu-Hsuan is a Ph.D. student in Civil Engineering Department at Texas A&M University. She obtained her Bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and Master's degree in Transportation Engineering from National Taiwan University. Her research experience computer vision and urban data science. In her free time, she enjoys watching movies and visiting film festivals.
Computer VisionUrban Data Science
Kai Yin
PhD Student
Kai is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. He joined the Urban Resilience.AI Lab in Summer 2022 as a graduate research assistant. His research interests lie in information retrieval, LLM-powered multi-agent systems, retrieval-augmented generation, LLM reasoning, and LLM4SocialGood. In his free time, Kai enjoys city walks and watching movies.
LLM AgentsInformation Retrieval
Lipai Huang
PhD Student
Lipai is a Ph.D. student majoring in AI and Data Science Track in Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University. He joined the UrbanResilience.ai Lab as a Data Science Researcher in Spring 2022. Lipai completed his Bachelor degree in Telecommunication Engineering at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in China. His research interests contain machine learning, deep learning, data analysis and visualization. In his free time, he enjoys watching Warriors games and playing Switch.
Machine LearningDeep Learning
Miguel Esparza
PhD Student
Miguel is a Ph.D. student in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence track of Civil Engineering Department at TAMU. He was a structural engineer at Arup before returning the Urban Resilience.AI Lab for his Ph.D. As a Masters and Undergraduate student at Texas A&M, he worked for the Urban Resilience.AI Lab where his research focused on the societal impacts of infrastructure disruption due to disasters. Now he aims to elevate his past research by using data science techniques to converge different datasets to improve the resiliency of the built environment and communities from disaster induced disruptions.
Data ScienceSocietal Impact
Yiming Xiao
PhD Student
Yiming joined the Urban Resilence.AI lab in the Fall of 2024 as a PhD student and a research assistant. He is deeply interested in applying AI technology to solve civil engineering problems and enhance community disaster resilience. He also likes to use data processing tools to extract valuable hidden information. Before joining Texas A&M, he obtained his Master’s degree at Tongji University and Bachelor's degree at Zhengzhou University. Outside of academics, Yiming is an active gym visitor and likes to stay muscular. He is also a fan of swimming and soccer.
Applied AICommunity Resilience
Shuning Gu
PhD Student
Shuning is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University, where she joined the UrbanResilience.AI Lab as a graduate research assistant in Summer 2026. Her research lies at the intersection of large language models, agents, and disaster AI, and she draws on her computer science background to improve the safety and performance of intelligent systems for disaster response. Outside of research, Shuning enjoys traveling, baking, and playing pickleball.
LLMsAI Safety
Zhitong Chen
PhD Student
Zhitong is a Ph.D. student at Texas A&M University and a graduate research assistant in the UrbanResilience.AI Lab. His research spans large language models, AI agents, retrieval-augmented generation, reinforcement learning, and reasoning and planning for disaster AI. His recent work focuses on developing reliable LLM-based and agentic systems for disaster response—including disaster question answering, multi-agent planning, and decision support under uncertainty—with the goal of building AI that strengthens emergency management and urban resilience through better reasoning, planning, and decision-making. In his free time, Zhitong enjoys traveling and watching movies.
LLM AgentsRL & Planning
Oliver Zhao
PhD Student
Oliver is a Ph.D. student in Civil & Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he researches urban resilience in the UrbanResilience.AI Lab directed by Dr. Ali Mostafavi. He previously studied at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, earned his B.Eng. magna cum laude as an honors scholar from Auburn University, and completed his M.S. at UCLA. His honors include a Tau Beta Pi fellowship, the Auburn Honors College Eagle of Excellence Award, and the Texas A&M Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering Excellence Fellowship.
Urban ResilienceInfrastructure
Aiyshwariya Paulvannan Kanmani
PhD Student
Aiyshwariya is a PhD student in the Artificial Intelligence track of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M. She was previously an Applied Scientist at Amazon and a Senior Data Scientist at American Airlines, building large-scale ML & AI models for forecasting, recommender systems, and LLM services. She holds an MS in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University and a BTech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras. Her research sits at the intersection of machine learning and environmental sustainability, integrating multimodal and geospatial AI to advance resilience for communities and the ecosystems they depend on. She is especially interested in developing models for equitable disaster recovery. Outside of research, she enjoys playing with her dog Sophie, reading, and camping & skiing across the PNW. Time outdoors keeps her close to the landscapes her work aims to protect.
Machine LearningGeospatial AI
Hengyi Wu
PhD Student
Hengyi is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University, where he joined the UrbanResilience.AI Lab as a graduate research assistant in Fall 2026. Before beginning his doctorate he earned his M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and his B.S. in Mathematics from New York University. His research focuses on continual learning and memory systems for language models and their applications to urban resilience. Outside of research, Hengyi enjoys going to the gym, visiting street markets, and traveling.
Continual LearningMemory Systems
Shanyong Wang
PhD Student
Shanyong is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the UrbanResilience.AI Lab. He received his B.E. in Computer Science from ShanghaiTech University, and during his undergraduate studies gained research experience at UIUC, Rutgers University, and ShanghaiTech University. His research focuses on information retrieval and decision-making systems. Outside of research, Shanyong enjoys swimming, playing basketball, and video games.
Information RetrievalDecision Systems
Master's & Undergraduate Students
Deho Kim
Master's Student
Deho is a master's student in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Texas A&M University and a member of the UrbanResilience.AI Lab. [Full biosketch to be added.]
Sanjay Thamsa
Master's Student
Sanjay is a master’s student in CS at Texas A&M working on scientific machine learning. Before A&M, he earned his BS in CS at UW-Madison. When he’s not doing research, he’s usually bouldering or at the gym.
Scientific Machine Learning
Alumni
Where our alumni are now.
Placements at leading universities, national labs, and industry — ordered by seniority and impact.
