Jingjun Li

Biography

Jingjun is an Assistant Professor in sustainable transport planning (passenger mobility) at Heriot-Watt University, Scotland. He has contributed to international transport planning projects across Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland and China. Currently, Jingjun is a Co-Investigator in TransiT, the UK’s largest research hub dedicated to transport decarbonisation through digital twins, bringing together 8 universities and 66 industrial partners.

Jingjun’s works develop human-centred solutions for more accessible, inclusive and sustainable passenger mobility transport systems, including reducing reliance on private vehicles, promoting public transport and active travel (walking and cycling), and guiding the adoption of emerging technologies such as electric and autonomous vehicles.

Methodologically, Jingjun uses data-driven digital technologies to design and evaluate the impact of transport policies on both individuals (preferences, behaviour and equity) and transport systems (emissions, accessibility and resilience). Recognising transport as a socio-technical system linking infrastructure and human decision-making, he adopts multi-disciplinary methods/toolkits, including agent-based simulation to assess policy impacts; optimisation to design implementable interventions; transport behaviours analysis and generative AI to better understand individual choices; and multi-stakeholder workshops to ensure policies fit the interests of different groups. By combining these methods into a structured workflow with up-to-date transport data, Jingjun develops “digital twins” that enable more comprehensive and adaptive policymaking than single tools alone. Notably, most of Jingjun’s research is delivered through open-source software (https://www.matsim.org/), supporting uptake by both researchers and practitioners.

Beyond research, Jingjun has contributed to multiple projects in Europe and China. He is also a member of the programme committee for the annual ABMTrans and ANT conference. Additionally, Jingjun has been involved in 5 teaching activities related to transport engineering and has supervised 19 bachelor's and master's theses from Heriot-Watt University (UK), TU Delft (the Netherlands), Beijing Jiaotong University (China) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium).

See the most recent update of Jingjun's work on LinkedIn.

Experience

• 2024 - 2025 PostDoc Researcher in Transport Digital Twin at XCARCITY project ( https://xcarcity.nl/), Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
• 2019 - 2024 Doctor of Philosophy, thesis title "Reducing Urban Private Vehicle Dependency With Shared Autonomous Vehicles - Agent-based Simulation As A Digital Testbed for Transport Policy Evaluations", Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
• 2016 - 2019 Master of Engineering, MEng: Transport Engineering with Business, University College Dublin, Ireland
• 2013 - 2017 Bachelor of Engineering, Transport Engineering, Chang’an University, China