Dr Yijing Li is a Reader in Urban Informatics Education at King's College London, where her work bridges computer science, geography, and urban science. A passionate educator and interdisciplinary researcher, Dr. Li leverages multi-disciplinary quantitative methodologies to solve complex urban challenges. Her teaching and research explore how data and spatial analysis can inform smarter, safer, and more resilient cities in an era of rapid environmental and technological change.

Dr. Li joined King’s College London in 2018. Prior to this, she served as a Teaching Fellow at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM) at the University of Warwick (2017–2018) and as a Lecturer at the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong (CELAP) (2014–2017). She holds a PhD in the Geography of Crime from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Urban Ecology from Peking University, where she utilized remote sensing image data and self-organized criticality theory to forecast vegetation changes in urbanized areas.

Research

Dr. Li’s research harnesses advanced geospatial analytics, machine learning, and multi-source big data to address pressing urban challenges. Her work operates at the intersection of the physical urban environment, societal behaviours, and academic pedagogy, focusing on: (1) urban criminology and spatial safety to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and empirical data to evaluate urban events’ influences and the equity and efficacy of policing strategies. (2) environmental health and sustainable urbanism to investigate how urban populations interact with their physical environment and the resulting public health outcomes. (3) methodological innovation in spatial analytics to solve complex urban problems by integrating cutting-edge computational methodologies such as Multimodal Deep Learning for environmental forecasting and utilizes scalable Bayesian double machine learning frameworks for high-dimensional causal estimation. (4) urban informatics education and employability to actively research pedagogy within data-centric computer science programs, so to enhance career readiness for the next generation of urban informatics professionals.

Further Information

• King’s Health Partners People
• MACC Hub project
• Disproportionality in Stop and Search