Chao Yuan is a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He received the Presidential Young Professorship as an assistant professor and founded the Urban Climate Design Lab at NUS, where he is also the principal investigator. As an architect, urban climate researcher, and educator, Yuan's teaching and research focus on climate-sensitive urban planning and design for sustainable, resilient cities. The topics he covers include urban wind environment, traffic-related and transboundary air pollution, anthropogenic heat, passive cooling technologies, and urban greenery. His goal is to support and develop practical planning and design solutions to build sustainability and resilience in real-world scenarios.

Yuan currently leads his research team, in collaboration with MIT and ETH Zurich, to conduct several studies on urban climate and future resilience for high-density cities. He serves as Director of Research in NUS Cities, Associate Editor for Urban Climate (Elsevier), and Editorial Board Member at Landscape and Urban Planning (Elsevier). Yuan’s work has been published in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals, book chapters, and a self-authored book titled Urban Wind Environment: Integrated Climate-Sensitive Planning and Design, published by Springer Nature. He recently established an IoT Sensing Network and integrated ground-based LiDAR into it for the validation of both microscale and mesoscale urban climate models.