About me
STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability
Faculty Director, MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE),
Faculty Director, MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, CRE, DUSP, SA+P
Dr. Siqi Zheng is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Center for Real Estate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (http://siqizheng.mit.edu). She established MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab (http://sul.mit.edu) in 2019, and MIT China Future City Lab in 2017 (which later became the “China Future City Program” under the new Sustainable Urbanization Lab), and is the faculty director of her Lab. Prof. Zheng was the former President of Asian Real Estate Society (2018-2019) and is on its Board now, and she is also on the Board of American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). She is the Associate Editor of China Economic Review, Journal of Regional Science, Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA).
Prof. Zheng’s field of specialization is urban and environmental economics, with a special focus on China and developing countries, including the environmental sustainability, place-based policies (new planned cities and transportation infrastructure) and self-sustaining urban growth. She published in many peer reviewed international journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Geography, European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning A, Ecological Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. A book she has co-authored with Matthew Kahn, Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (Princeton University Press) was published in 2016. She has also published more than 100 papers and two books in Chinese. Dr. Zheng has completed or been undertaking research projects granted or entrusted by the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, among others. She received her Ph.D. in urban development and real estate from Tsinghua University in 2005, and did her post-doc research at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Prior to coming to MIT, she was a professor and the director of Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University, China.
