Ryan Qi Wang

Ryan Qi Wang is an associate research director on social media of the Boston Area Research Initiative (BARI) and studies the interplay between urban informatics and urban, infrastructure, and social resilience. His research focuses on two interrelated areas: human movement perturbation under the influence of natural and manmade disasters (collaborating with UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, and Virginia Tech), and geosocial networks in big cities (collaborating with Harvard University).

Before joining in Northeastern, he was a postdoc fellow at the Department of Sociology, Harvard University where he found research interests in studying social inequality and segregation using the “big data” from Twitter by working with Prof. Robert Sampson and Mario Small. He received his PhD from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Virginia Tech. His advisor was Prof. John Taylor, director of the Network Dynamics lab. During his time at Virginia Tech, he was the first PhD fellow at BioBuild, an interdisciplinary program, and a Via Teaching Fellow.