Research direction: Urban Spatial Dynamic Modeling; AI-driven Urban Planning; Sustainable Urban Regeneration

Zipan Cai, Professor, Ph.D supervisor at the School of Architecture, Southeast University. He obtained his Bachelor’s degree in Geomatics and Computer Science from the University of Waterloo, Canada, in 2014. He received his Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Geographic Information Science (2017) and Land and Water Resources Engineering (2023), respectively, from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He has previously served as a visiting scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and an Assistant Urban Planner at AECOM. From July 2023 to January 2025, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Urban Planning at the School of Architecture and Built Environment, Lund University, Sweden. He concurrently holds positions as a Guest Researcher at the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment and a core research member of the SATORI (GeoSpAtial daTa-mOdel-aRtificial Intelligence) Research Lab in Sweden.

His main research interests include urban spatial dynamic modeling, AI-driven urban planning, and sustainable urban regeneration. His recent work focuses on applying vision-language models to urban studies, evaluating urban regeneration potential with integrated deep learning techniques, and simulating and optimizing urban spaces at multiple scales. In recent years, he has published more than 10 papers as first or corresponding author in leading international journals, including two in Nature Climate Change (a top-tier interdisciplinary journal ranked in the top 1%), recognized as ESI Highly Cited Papers. His research achievements have been acknowledged by an international jury under the International Science Council (ISC), and he was awarded the 2025 Frontiers Planet Prize as both the national champion for Sweden and the global grand prize winner. He also received the 2024 National Award for Outstanding Self-Financed Students Abroad (Category B), an honor given to only 50 recipients globally each year.

He currently serves on the editorial board of Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (Springer Nature), and as guest editor for Urban Science. He is an invited reviewer for over 25 top-tier SCI/SSCI journals, including Nature Climate Change, Nature Communications, npj Urban Sustainability, Ambio, and Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science. He leads projects funded by the National High-Level Young Talents Program, the Lars Erik Lundberg Research and Education Foundation in Sweden, and the Key Laboratory for Carbon Neutrality and Spatial Optimization under China’s Ministry of Natural Resources. He also serves as a Distinguished Expert for the China Future City Council (CFCC) of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat).