ABOUT

ZIMU DENG (MARK)

Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) student at Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania.

He got his bachelor's degree in architecture at the University of Nottingham. His research interests include urban AI technology, urban sustainability, resilience, and public health towards climate change, urban micro-climate modeling, urban morphology optimization, and urban spatial analysis.

TESS VU

Master of Urban Spatial Analytics (MUSA) student at Department of City and Regional Planning, University of Pennsylvania.

An interdisciplinary student whose work sits at the intersection of GeoAI, environmental health, and urban systems. As a first-generation student, her path into research has been nonlinear—shaped not by a single discipline, but by a persistent curiosity about how data, place, and equity interact. Drawing from a background in environmental sciences, spatial analytics, and machine learning, she designs computational tools that make hidden forms of risk visible: from emerging contaminants in Philadelphia's water system, to heat exposure in Saigon, and now to quality-of-life disparities revealed through 311 data in New York City.

Her interests integrates field-based sampling, remote sensing, deep learning, spatial statistics, and civic technology. Before graduate school, she worked in telecommunications, cancer research, and was involved in community advocacy, which shaped her commitment to producing science that is technically rigorous yet grounded in lived experience.

Across every project, she hopes to bring a reflective, systems-oriented approach: using data not just to predict, but to understand, explain, and intervene.