Yilei Yu earned her Ph.D. in Geographic Information Science from Arizona State University in 2025. Trained as both a geographer and spatial scientist with a background in architecture and urban planning, she brings an interdisciplinary perspective to studying the interactions between natural hazards, the built environment, and social inequality.

Her dissertation advances the use of spatial data science to better understand, predict, and mitigate the vulnerability of communities and infrastructure to flooding and other natural hazards. By integrating large-scale, high-resolution datasets on building characteristics, economic conditions, and hazard exposures, her work addresses key methodological challenges, such as the modifiable areal unit problem, and enables more precise, fine-scale assessments of risk and vulnerability.

Yu’s current research focuses on Houston, Texas, where she examines how urban development patterns, socioeconomic disparities, and environmental change intersect to shape flood vulnerability and resilience. Her latest publication, Flood risk and the built environment: Big property data for environmental justice and social vulnerability analysis (Yu et al., 2025), contributes to ongoing scholarship on environmental justice and hazard vulnerability.

Prior to joining CFAR, Yu taught geographic information science courses at Arizona State University, where she served as an instructor in GIS programming with R and Python. In this role, she guided students in applying computational methods to spatial analysis, environmental data, and hazard research.