Yuye (Julia) Zhou

My current research brings together three interconnected directions:

• Urban climate and environmental exposure, especially heat, pollution, and the unequal distribution of environmental burdens and benefits;
• Three-dimensional urban form and vegetation, including sky view factor, shade, canopy structure, and volumetric greenness;
• Geospatial AI and multimodal sensing, using LiDAR, satellite imagery, street-view data, and computational models to better represent lived urban environments.

Across these areas, I am interested in how advanced spatial methods can move beyond coarse surface descriptions to better capture the environments people actually see, feel, and move through, and how these approaches can generate new evidence for more equitable planning, design, and environmental decision-making.

Pedestrian-Scale Sky View Factor Mapping with Street View and LiDAR

UC Berkeley · 2025–Present

• Developing a human-centered framework to estimate Sky View Factor (SVF) from street-view imagery and 3D urban reconstruction.
• Combining monocular geometry, panoramic imagery, and LiDAR benchmarks to validate pedestrian-level visibility of the sky.
• Supporting urban climate, radiation, and thermal comfort studies with scalable street-level environmental indicators.

Large-Scale LiDAR Processing for Urban Environmental Analysis

UC Berkeley · 2024–Present

• Building scalable Python-based workflows to process large LiDAR collections for U.S. cities.
• Generating high-resolution DSM/DTM products and extracting metrics related to urban morphology, vegetation structure, and visibility.
• Using 3D data to study street enclosure, shade potential, tree structure, and neighborhood-scale environmental conditions.

3D Vegetation Structure, Shade, and Environmental Equity

UC Berkeley · 2025–Present

• Investigating how three-dimensional vegetation structure changes the way urban greenness is measured and experienced.
• Developing metrics beyond conventional 2D canopy cover to capture vertical complexity, volumetric greenness, and pedestrian exposure.
• Connecting urban vegetation structure to questions of distributional justice, cooling benefits, and greening inequities.

Mobility-Based Heat Exposure and Human-Centered Urban Simulation

UC Berkeley · 2025–Present

• Designing computational frameworks to estimate how people experience heat and environmental risk during daily mobility.
• Integrating mobility patterns, urban form, thermal environments, and behavioral heterogeneity into human-centered exposure models.
• Exploring how AI-driven simulation can support more equitable and climate-responsive urban planning.

Green Schoolyards, Shade Access, and Child Environmental Equity

UC Berkeley · 2024–Present

• Mapping and evaluating shade access and greening disparities across school environments using GIS and remote sensing.
• Combining tree canopy, built environment, and demographic data to identify inequities in schoolyard heat exposure.
• Collaborating with partners to support evidence-based, equitable design interventions for healthier school spaces.

Teaching

• Graduate Student Instructor, GEOG C188 GIS · UC Berkeley · Fall 2025
  Led lab sections, prepared tutorials, and graded assignments for undergraduate students in geospatial data analysis.
• Graduate Student Instructor, ESPM C289 Applied Remote Sensing · UC Berkeley · Spring 2026
  Led lab sections, prepared tutorials, and graded assignments for graduate students.

Academic Service

• Peer reviewer for academic journals including Scientific Reports, Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, and Computational Urban Science.