Yichun Fan is a PhD candidate in Urban Economics from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, specializing in Environmental Policy and Planning. She is also a graduate researcher at the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL). Yichun conducts research in urban and environmental economics, blending methods from urban science and computational social science. Her research examines the economics of human responses to major environmental and health threats in cities, with the aim of informing more effective and equitable urban sustainability policies. By merging urban big data and computational methods, her recent work develops novel measures of human behaviors that are essential for emotion and well-being, interpersonal interactions, and urban health and vibrancy. She then incorporates these large-scale behavioral observations into econometric analyses to unveil the neglected social costs of environmental hazards and policies, as well as the latent drivers for adaptation disparities. Her work has been published in journals like Nature Human Behavior, Nature Communications, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Research Letters, Scientific Reports, and Cities. Prior to starting her PhD, she received her Master’s in City Planning from MIT and Bachelor’s in Environmental Engineering from Tsinghua University. Beyond her academic pursuits, Yichun is passionate about hiking, yoga, and playing the pipa.