Bio

Zhenhua is an Associate Professor in City and Regional Planning (CRP) at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU. His research interest includes infrastructure planning and policy, regional science, risk and resilience, and big data analytics. He has a strong background in economic impact assessments of infrastructure investment, disasters and resilience using Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) models. He is one of the lead developers of the Economic Consequence Analysis Tool, an Excel-VBA software that is intended for policymakers and analysts who need quick estimates of the economic impact of numerous threats, including terrorism, natural disasters, and technological accidents.

Zhenhua has published five books, including Chinese Railways in the Era of High Speed (Emerald, 2015), Economic Consequence Analysis of Disasters: The E-CAT Software Tool (Springer, 2017),  Big Data for Regional Science (Routledge, 2017), High-Speed Rail and China’s New Economic Geography (Edward Elgar, 2019), and Development Studies in Regional Science: Essays in Honor of Kingsley E. Haynes (Springer, 2020).  His recent work has been published in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, such as Transportation Research Part A, Part D, Transport Reviews, Journal of Transport Geography, Transportation, Transport Policy, Journal and Transport and Land Use, Journal of Air Transport Management, Accident Analysis and Prevention, Travel Behavior and Society, Environment Research Letters, Risk Analysis, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Land Use Policy, Journal of Regional Science, Annals of Regional Science, Papers in Regional Science, Computer Environment and Urban Systems, Economic Systems Research, Applied Geography, Journal of Planning Education and Research, European Planning Studies, Landscape and Urban Planning, Sustainable Cities and Society, Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, Economic Development Quarterly, Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy, Applied Economic Letters, Plos One, Asia Europe Journal, and International Journal of Urban Sciences.

He has received a series of awards, including the Geoffery Hewings Award, Lumley Research Award, William Miernyk Research Metal, Charles Tiebout Prize, the Benjamin H. Stevens Graduate Fellowship in Regional Science, the Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. Fellowship Award awarded by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., and the Best Dissertation Award of the Regional Science Association International.

Before joining OSU, Zhenhua was a postdoctoral research associate at the National Center of Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) at the University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from George Mason University, a MA in Regional Economics from Shenzhen University in China, and a BA in Management from the University of Electronic and Science and Technology of China.