Institution/Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Email Address: leizhao@illinois.edu
Committee(s): Collaborator
Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor affiliated with the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Lei Zhao is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and assistant professor affiliated with the National Center of Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research concerns the physical and engineering processes in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer where most human activities and environmental systems are concentrated, with a particular focus on built surfaces and urban environments. He combines theory, numerical modeling, remote sensing and in situ observations, and cutting-edge machine learning methods to study environmental fluid mechanics and land-atmosphere dynamics that relate to urban environments, microclimatology and hydrology, climate change, climate impacts and adaptation. He has published many peer-reviewed papers in top-ranked journals including Nature, Nature Climate Change, Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications as first author and/or corresponding author. Lei received his Ph.D. (2015) in atmospheric and environmental science from the School of the Environment at Yale University. Before joining at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lei was a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University. Lei obtained his B.S. degree (2009) in Physics and Atmospheric Physics from Nanjing University in China.