Prof. Xuelin Zhang is an urban environment researcher holding a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) in Hong Kong, China. She has earned a bachelor’s degree in building service engineering from Tianjin Polytechnic University in 2013, a master’s degree in building service engineering from the University of Hong Kong in 2014.

She is currently an associate professor attached to the school of atmospheric sciences at Sun Yat-sen University (SYSU). Before that she hold a joint appointment as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Building Physics at the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e) and HKUST from September 2018 to February 2020, where she intensively worked on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations on built environments. In addition, Prof. Zhang is an expert in wind tunnel test modeling including pedestrian-level wind tunnel tests, detailed AVA tests, and Particle Image Velocity (PIV). She has built an ABL wind tunnel at SYSU Zhuhai Campus also built up her own research group named Built Environment and Urban Physics (BEUP).

Up to the date, Prof. Zhang has published 52 SCI journal papers in well-reputed journals in wind engineering, building engineering, and building energy simulation, etc. She earned the support from Excellent Young Scientists Fund Program 2021 (Overseas), a general funding from NFSC (Natural Science Foundation of China), and several funding from Guangdong government, Guangzhou government and SYSU. Her current research focuses on urban wind and thermal environment, natural ventilation, air pollutant dispersion, aerosol dispersion, built wind energy, novel building forms, and machine learning applications in environmental wind engineering.

In addition to that she is serving as an associate editor of Physics of Fluids (JCR Q1 Top), a reviewer in several international journals and a committee member of National Key Laboratory of Atmospheric Physics Simulation and Pollution Control.