Li Yin promoted to full professor of urban and regional planning

Since joining UB in 2004, she has pushed at the boundaries of her field with advanced applications in Geographic Information Systems that visualize the impact of urban features, from parks to public transit to affordable housing, on location choices and urban development patterns. The innovative method explores the complexity and dynamic processes of urban systems for more efficient, equitable and sustainable urban planning, design, and development.

A prolific and widely cited scholar, Yin has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles in leading international journals, including Applied Geography, Urban Studies, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, the Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Geography, Cities, the International Journal of Geographic Information Science, and the Journal of Urban Planning and Development. She is a co-author for the book, Affordable Housing in U.S. Shrinking Cities: From Neighborhoods of Despair to Neighborhoods of Opportunity (Policy Press, 2016).

Since 2023, she has been named among the “World’s Top 2% Scientists” in Urban and Regional Planning, a distinction awarded to just over 300 leading scholars worldwide, based on a ranking compiled by Stanford University in collaboration with Elsevier. Her research has been funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, National Institutes of Health, Sloan Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Trained across the disciplines of the built environment, Yin earned her PhD in design and planning from the University of Colorado and holds an MS in urban planning, land, and housing development from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok, Thailand, and a BS in Architecture from Kunming University of Science and Technology in China.

At UB, Yin furthers her research as head of the Urban Analytics Lab, engaging more than a dozen faculty members and graduate students in urban planning, engineering, computer science, and public health in research at the intersection of technology, society, and planning.

As a doctoral student at the University of Colorado, her dissertation on suburban growth patterns in the intermountain regions of the western United States was among the first studies to apply agent-based modeling (computational simulations of complex systems) to land use dynamics. In 2015, she and a team of engineers and computer scientists at UB published a pioneering paper applying machine learning algorithms to Google Street View images to discern indicators of walkability, paving the way for large-scale, objective assessments of human behavior in urban environments.

More recently, Yin has advanced her research into the space of Urban AI, an emerging, multidisciplinary field applying Generative AI and “GeoAI” (artificial intelligence fused with geospatial data) to produce more nuanced intelligence on urban dynamics. AI applications in urban planning enable high levels of visualization, simulations, 3D modeling, and database management for analysis of development scenarios for cities and regions. She has published multiple studies using ChatGPT and Large Language Models as a public sentiment analysis tool and urban behavior modeling system, as captured by social media and the interconnected world of Google Maps, urban sensors and IoT devices.

“Technology and computation have always been useful in helping us describe cities and how they behave and operate,” Yin stated in a previous UB article on her research. “AI, however, will change how we plan and design cities. It’s revolutionary, really.”

Yin's teaching portfolio at UB reflects her concentration on technological applications in urban planning, with courses including AI for Environmental Planning and Design, GIS Applications, 3D Visualization and Urban Simulation, and Planning Support Systems/Advanced GIS at the graduate level, and GIS in Planning and Computing for Environmental Analysis in UB’s BA in Environmental Design program.

She is an innovator in the space of urban planning and design education. In 2025, she was appointed chair of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning’s Urban Planning AI Taskforce. Earlier this year, she published a paper on AI literacy and the integration of GenAI and GeoAI technologies into urban design and planning education.

A dedicated mentor, Yin has chaired or served as a member on the dissertation committees of seven urban planning doctoral students at UB who today are applying urban analytics to such issues as inclusive transportation, disaster response, property abandonment, and the revitalization of historically disinvested neighborhoods. She has also served as thesis committee chair for four Master of Urban Planning students at UB, two of whom are now associate professors in urban analytics-related fields.

Her current academic and professional service appointments range from chair of the North American Chapter of the International Association of China Planning, to membership on the Diversity Committee of the United University Professions’ Buffalo chapter, to service on UB’s Academic Integrity Committee and Faculty Senate Committee on Tenure, Promotion, and Privileges.