PhD Student Profiles

Hanbei Chen serves as a Graduate Assistant to Professor Hyesun Jeong.
Her research primarily focuses on Nature-based Solutions and urban climate resilience.
Her research interests include the application of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), remote sensing, spatial analysis, and machine learning in urban planning and climate adaptation.

Email: chen2hb@mail.uc.edu

Henry Levesque's research translates emerging technologies into open-source tools for human-centered urban design, spanning AI-assisted analysis, physical computing and sensor-based data collection, and GIS-based urban modeling. His current work includes an open-source AI analysis tool, a Raspberry Pi environmental data collection toolkit, and an open-source urban design asset library. Email: levesqhl@mail.uc.edu

Eyoel Gebrewold is an architect, educator, researcher, and consultant with more than 13 years of experience in Architectural Design, Housing, Urban Design, and Planning across academia, government, and professional practice.
His research interests include housing, urban governance, spatial development, customary institutions and practices, and post-conflict urban recovery.
His doctoral research examines "Metesha", a customary land tenure practice,  and its relationship to housing, land, and governance in post-war Mekelle, Ethiopia.

Email: gebreweh@mail.uc.edu

Haiqing Liu’s research focuses on urban and metropolitan resilience, sustainability, and spatial planning, particularly the use of GIS, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to understand complex urban systems.
His work examines how resilience and sustainability are conceptualized and measured across social, economic, and environmental dimensions, while developing data-driven approaches to support urban and regional planning.

                                                                             Email: liu2hq@mail.uc.edu

Arini Murwindarti is currently working on a dissertation focusing on tourism planning in rural communities in Indonesia.

Her broader research interests include regional and rural planning, participatory planning, tourism, and community development.

Email: murwinai@mail.uc.edu

Sofiu Adekunle’s research sits at the intersection of postcolonial urbanism, affordable housing, and community development in the Global South with empirical focus on Nigeria.
He uses postcolonial theory to interrogate the dominance of Global North planning models in Southern cities; the assumptions they carry, the problems they are presumed to solve, and what is lost when they are transplanted without scrutiny.

Email: adekunst@mail.uc.edu

Yajie Hu is a Ph.D. student in transportation planning whose research examines the relationship between travel behavior and the built environment.

Her dissertation focuses on autonomous vehicles as an emerging mobility technology and investigates their potential impacts on transit ridership and parking demand.

Email: hu2ye@mail.uc.edu

Rista Ardy Priatama, is a Fulbright PhD Scholar in Regional Development Planning. Rista's research examines the socio-economic and spatial interactions between the solar energy transition and agricultural land use in the United States. 

This includes how utility-scale solar development, from interconnection queues to built projects, shapes farmland markets and agricultural investment; how state policies such as Massachusetts' SMART program promote agrivoltaics (dual-use solar and farming); and what drives or constrains farmers' adoption of these systems. 

The work draws on spatial econometrics, economic modeling, and agent-based modeling.

                                                                             Email: priatara@mail.uc.edu