Dr. Yu (Billie) Zhang is a postdoctoral research fellow working with Prof. Nancy Ross on the health impacts of the Réseau express métropolitain (REM), Montréal’s new automated light rail system. Alongside this work she is a visiting fellow at the School of Urban Planning at McGill University, where she collaborates with Prof. Ahmed El-Geneidy in the Transportation Research at McGill (TRAM) group. Her research sits at the meeting point of transportation planning, public health, and the built environment, and asks how major transit investments reshape the way people travel, where they live, and how healthy their daily lives can be. Dr. Zhang holds a Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Toronto, which she earned in 2024. Before joining Prof. Ross, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Prof. Eric Miller at the University of Toronto and served as a Transportation Modeller with the World Bank Group, where she led a global simulation tool for urban transport decarbonization across low- and middle-income countries.
Dr. Zhang communicates her research widely to academic, policy, and practitioner audiences through peer-reviewed articles, technical reports to government, and conference presentations. She has published in a range of leading journals, including Journal of Transport Geography, Transportation Research Part A and Part D, and Journal of Choice Modelling. One of her most recent articles examines how the built environment and large-scale public transit investment impact the public physical activity. Her work is interdisciplinary, spanning travel demand modelling, housing and land use, air quality, and physical activity, and it speaks to public health researchers and city planners as well as to fellow transportation scientists who share the goal of building healthier and more sustainable cities.
As part of her research agenda with Prof. Ross, Dr. Zhang is studying how the arrival of the REM changes life across the Greater Montréal Region. This research follows several health-related pathways at once. One strand asks whether the new light rail line improves urban air quality, using a machine-learning counterfactual analysis of satellite-measured nitrogen dioxide (NO2) to estimate what pollution levels would have looked like without the REM. A second strand links the opening of the line to transport-related physical activity, drawing on longitudinal survey data to see whether residents walk and cycle more once rapid transit becomes available. A third connects the new system to work performance and broader health outcomes for commuters. Together these projects offer a picture of how a single infrastructure investment can ripple outward into the environment, into daily activity, and into wellbeing. Dr. Zhang has also been supervising master's students and undergraduate research assistant at both McGill and Queen's University on closely related questions, from gentrification and displacement around REM stations to pedestrian safety near commuter rail.
Dr. Zhang brings a supportive and collaborative approach to the students she mentors, an approach shaped by her interest in teaching and professional development, which has included guest lecturing at McGill and instructing courses at the University of Toronto. She contributes generously to her scholarly communities as a reviewer for numerous journals, as a mentor with the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology. Her research has also reached the wider public through interviews with CBC News on Canada’s proposed high-speed rail. Dr. Zhang makes meaningful contributions through both her research and her service to the many communities of which she is a part, and there is much to look forward to in where her work will take her next.