Qiuchen Lu

Welcoming Professor Qiuchen Lu as a DAFNI Fellow!

Dr Lu is Professor at The Bartlett School of Sustainable Management, University College London (UCL), is one of 10 new DAFNI Fellows, selected from 116 applicants for the nationally competitive programme.

She is a globally recognised scholar in digital innovation for the built environment.

Her research focuses on the integration of digital twins, AI, and informatics to support the development of smart, sustainable, and resilient (3S) city systems under climate change.

Within her Fellowship, her work will focus on integrating transport, flood, and urban systems through advanced digital twin and data-driven approaches to support more adaptive and informed decision-making.

She says, “Being appointed as a DAFNI Fellow is a great honour and an important opportunity to further my research on infrastructure resilience under climate change.

“I am particularly excited to work with the wider DAFNI community to promote open collaboration, interdisciplinary innovation, and long-term societal impact for resilient infrastructure systems.”

She is one of 10 new DAFNI Fellows selected from 116 applicants for this nationally competitive programme. The Fellowship provides £10,000 to support staff time, travel, knowledge exchange and dissemination, alongside opportunities to build networks through workshops, conferences and community engagement.

Qiuchen is familiar with the DAFNI platform, having been Principal Investigator on the DAFNI-funded IMPACT project which focused on Improving flood disruPted road networks with a dynamic people-Centric digital Twins.
The work is helping to improve the resilience of transport networks by developing an innovative people-centric digital twin (DT) to evaluate the dynamic congestion risks to transport links during flooding events.

She adds, “I am excited to have the opportunity to work with DAFNI again through the Fellowship.

“My research needs DAFNI’s computational infrastructure for cross-city validation at scale. Based on my previous DAFNI-funded IMPACT project, the physics-informed models and high-order interaction analyses we developed demand intensive computation across multiple urban networks simultaneously. These are requirements that DAFNI’s platform uniquely satisfies.”

Her Fellowship will deliver high-quality, reproducible, and open-access research outputs fully aligned with the FAIR data principles and DAFNI’s long-term sustainability objectives.