K. Huang

News

  1. Confirmed participant, SSP Urbanisation Workshop (WorldPop / University of Bristol).

  2. “Toward Cooler Cities by Larger Homogeneous Functional Clusters” published online in PNAS.↗

  3. “Nested economies of scale in global city mass” published in Nature Cities (open access).↗

  4. NYU News covered our Nature Cities paper “Nested economies of scale in global city mass”: “Cities’ Infrastructure Grows More Slowly Than Their Populations Do.”↗

  5. Hosting Prof. Timon McPhearson (Urban Systems Lab / NYU) for a guest talk at NYU Shanghai.

  6. Received the 2025–2026 NYU Shanghai Teaching Excellence Award; featured in “In the AI Age, How Do Great Teachers Teach?”↗

  7. “Nested economies of scale in global city mass” is in press at Nature Cities, scheduled for the November issue.

  8. Height-aware, protection-informed flood assessment published in Scientific Reports.↗

  9. China Fund grant (Co-PI with Mingzhen Lu): “Boom or bust: accessibility tipping point underlying divergent urban transitions in China.”

  10. Nature Portfolio featured the npj Environmental Social Sciences informal-settlement cooling paper on WeChat and Weibo.

  11. Hosted SM26 visiting research students in the CLUEs Lab.

  12. Informal settlement demolition and urban cooling published in npj Environmental Social Sciences.↗

  13. Advisee Gabriel Fernandes won Most Popular Project at the Fall 2025 Undergraduate Research Symposium.↗

  14. Advisees Gabriel Fernandes (Coachtopia) and Xi Bingxin named Millennium Fellows.↗

  15. Cities at a Crossroads (SOCS-SHU 208) named a Shanghai City-Level Undergraduate Key Course.

  16. Rapid probabilistic inundation mapping published in Remote Sensing, with undergraduate co-author Lihan Feng.

  17. Lead-authored “Declining urban density attenuates rising population exposure to surface heat extremes” published in Scientific Reports.↗

  18. Co-authored “Dual impact of global urban overheating on mortality” published in Nature Climate Change.↗

  19. Advisee Ziyun Xu featured in “Her Life in the Wild”; Best Presentation award and path to Yale School of Public Health.↗

  20. China Fund grant: “Mapping the Mismatch: The Urbanization of the Built Environment Versus People in Modern China.”

  21. Received a Google Award for Inclusion Research (~$60,000) for heat extremes in China’s urban informal settlements.↗

  22. Received an NYU Climate Change Initiative Seed Grant for climate trade-offs in future urban growth.↗

  23. Selected for the Shanghai Leading Talents Program, Distinguished Young Scholars.

  24. Yale Environment and Scientific American covered our Environmental Research Letters study on urban heat under climate change.↗