Ying Song’s research focuses on developing and applying spatial methods to visualize, explore, analyze, and model movement and change in geographic space with respect to time. Her major empirical focus is human mobility and accessibility within transportation networks, especially at the urban and regional level. She strives to promote equitable, green, and healthy transportation planning with cutting-edge geospatial data and methods.
Song earned her PhD from the Ohio State University in 2015. Her award-winning dissertation develops an approach that can estimate the mobility-related environmental costs of individuals’ space-time accessibility such as carbon emissions. She has extended this work to social and economic dimensions of sustainable transportation since her graduation. Her recent works are supported by the McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2021-2023) and Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT).