Kangning (Ken) Huang is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at NYU Shanghai. He received his PhD degree from Yale University, School of the Environment in 2020. Prior to joining NYU, he was an Advanced Study Program Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. His research and teaching focus on the overarching question of: How does urbanization affect climate change? The urbanization-induced land cover changes affect the regional climate by altering the surface hydrometeorological processes, and the urbanization-induced life-style changes affect the global climate by increasing fossil energy consumption. However, the cross-scale impacts of urbanization on climate change are not constant; instead, these impacts depend on where and how we will build cities of the future. By developing global-scale urbanization scenarios, his research explores a broad range of possible urban climate futures and the interventions needed to achieve the more sustainable ones. His research has been funded by NASA (via an NESSF graduate fellowship), NSF (via an NCAR postdoc fellowship), and other sponsors.

Select Publications

• Huang, Kangning, Xia Li, Xiaoping Liu, and Karen C. Seto. "Projecting global urban land expansion and heat island intensification through 2050." Environmental Research Letters 14, no. 11 (2019): 114037.
• Huang, Kangning, Xuhui Lee, Brian Stone Jr, Jason Knievel, Michelle L. Bell, and Karen C. Seto. "Persistent increases in nighttime heat stress from urban expansion despite heat island mitigation." Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 126, no. 4 (2021): e2020JD033831.
• Huang, Kangning, Jiye Leng, Yong Xu, Xinwei Li, Meng Cai, Ran Wang, and Chao Ren. "Facilitating urban climate forecasts in rapidly urbanizing regions with land-use change modeling." Urban Climate 36 (2021): 100806.
• Huang, Kangning, Xiaoping Liu, Xia Li, Jiayong Liang, and Shenjing He. "An improved artificial immune system for seeking the Pareto front of land-use allocation problem in large areas." International Journal of Geographical Information Science 27, no. 5 (2013): 922-946.
• Chen, G., Li, X., Liu, X., Chen, Y., Liang, X., Leng, J., ... & Huang, K. (2020). Global projections of future urban land expansion under shared socioeconomic pathways. Nature communications, 11(1), 1-12.

Research Interests

• Environmental impact from urbanization and climate change
• Future urbanization and its interaction with climate change
• Urban climate impact assessment and reduction