Meiqing Li is a PhD candidate studying city and regional planning at the University of California, Berkeley. Her focus areas include sustainable transportation, travel behavio
r modeling, and urban spatial analytics,
and her research explores the intersection between sustainable transportation, travel behavior, and the built environment in the United States and Asia.
Working with professor Daniel Rodriguez, Meiqing examines pedestrian infrastructure changes in transit station areas across the United States and their impact on transit users. The team collaborated with
Stanford Machine Learning Group to detect changes of marked crosswalks around transit-oriented station areas. The deep learning-based computer vision generated national-scale historical datasets for empirical analysis. Through their research, they are also evaluating the impact of crosswalk enhancement and other built environment changes on transit uses. “My favorite part of the NICR project was interacting and talking to transit agencies and researchers from other disciplines,” wrote Meiqing. “Talking to different people and learning from their backgrounds provides me with inspiration.”
After graduate, Meiqing hopes to become a professor, and she encourages undergraduate students to explore: “There are always opportunities to make positive changes to our current system and contribute to a more sustainable and equitable future.”
Outside of school, Meiqing enjoys reading, listening to music, and hiking.