Junyi Zhang specialises in transdisciplinary research for sustainable development, spanning transportation, cities and regions, energy and environment, natural and social risks, health, tourism and quality of life—across several countries, with Asia at its geographical core. He spent more than 30 years in Japan,where his work focused on international development and cooperation for sustainable development in low-income nations, training several hundred doctoral and master’s students from those regions and conducting extensive field surveys.
He returned to his home country, China, in 2023. He is currently Chair Professor at the School of Transportation and Director of the Research Center for Transport-Energy-Materials Integration at Southeast University. He is also a Foreign Fellow of the Engineering Academy of Japan and has been ranked among the world’s top 2% of scientists for career-long impact (Stanford University/Elsevier).
From 2020 to 2024, he served as Co-Chair of the COVID-19 Task Force for the World Conference on Transport Research Society (WCTRS) and convened the International Conference on Pandemics and Transport Policy in 2020. He currently holds several prominent positions, including Chair of the WCTRS Task Force on Transport and Logistics Amid Global Crises, Chair of the Electric Road Systems Working Group of the World Road Association (PIARC) and Member of the Academic Committee of the World Transport Convention (WTC), among others.
He has published over 540 peer-reviewed academic papers and has received 12 international awards, including eight Best Paper Awards and four Outstanding Paper Awards. He also serves as a reviewer for many leading international journals. As an author, he has published several books, including Urbanimmunology: Rethinking Cities and Society through Immunological Principles (Springer, 2026), Urbanimmunology: Shielding Cities and Society Through Transportation (Springer, 2026), Research Handbook on Transport and COVID-19 (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025), Transportation Amid Pandemics: Lessons Learned from COVID-19 (Elsevier, 2022), Transport and Energy Research: A Behavioral Perspective (Elsevier, 2019), Routledge Handbook of Transport in Asia (Routledge, 2018) and Life-oriented Behavioral Research for Urban Policy (Springer, 2017). His publications also include numerous other scholarly works.
