Our team
Our team
Professor Hoon Han
Professor Hoon Han is the Director of the UNSW Cities Institute. Hoon is an award-winning researcher and educator in urban and regional planning. His work advances spatially integrated social science by examining how cities evolve in response to emerging challenges and opportunities. His recent research focuses on smart cities and the integration of AI with urban culture and sustainability, particularly in support of UN Sustainable Development Goal 11.
Hoon also currently holds the position of Director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI)-UNSW Research Centre and Associate Director at the City Futures Research Centre. From 2022 to 2023, he served as the President of the Korean Academy of Scientists and Engineers in Australasia (KASEA).
Dr Mijin Choo
Dr Mijin Choo is a visiting researcher fellow at the Cities Institute. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning and Engineering from Yonsei University, South Korea. Her work sits at the intersection of urban resilience, climate adaptation, disaster management, and urban data analytics, with a particular emphasis on how socio-spatial inequalities shape differential vulnerability and recovery outcomes. Her research investigates how urban systems respond to shocks such as extreme heat and disasters, with a particular focus on uneven impacts across communities and different built environment settings. She has extensive experience in quantitative and data-driven approaches and spatial modelling.
Her work has contributed to advancing evidence-based approaches to urban resilience planning and has been published in leading international journals. She is particularly interested in translating research into actionable strategies for enhancing community-level climate resilience, especially in the context of increasing heat extremes.
Dr Kezia Hsu
Dr Kezia Hsu is an urban researcher and spatial analyst whose work examines how human settlements, urban form, economic activities, environmental conditions, and emerging technologies interact to shape smart, healthy, and sustainable cities. She recently completed her PhD in Planning and Urban Development at Built Environment, UNSW, where her doctoral research investigated the three-dimensional dynamics of urban floor-space use in the City of Sydney and its relationships with socio-economic and environmental conditions.
Trained in geography and urban planning, Kezia applies spatial analytics, machine learning, agent-based modelling, and other computational approaches to understand how complex urban systems evolve across physical and digital environments. Her broader research interests include urban analytics, smart and AI cities, spatial decision support, human–environment interactions and data-driven urban planning. She is particularly interested in translating complex spatial and urban data into practical insights that can support better planning, policy, and decision-making for cities. Her recent project at the Cities Institute includes Data centres and neighbouring human settlements, spatial distribution of mental health prevalence, from smart city to quantum AI City, and floor space use DNA in volumetric city.
Sarah Ford
Sarah Ford is Business Administrator for the Cities Institute. She has been working at the UNSW for over 20 years. She is also currently an Administrative Officer at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity.
Scientia Fellow Dr Jinhee Kim
Dr Jinhee Kim is Scientia Fellow at the Cities Institute. Her research interests include understanding the complexities of urban health paradigms relevant to addressing the spatial impacts of urban environments on human health. She applies her research findings in developing real-world transdisciplinary action that engages stakeholders from academic and non-academic backgrounds and across various disciplines and sectors. Prior to joining UNSW, she has worked in all levels of government with a focus on healthy cities and health impact assessment as tools to prioritise health equity in urban policies.
Jinhee serves as Editor-in-Chief of Urban Health Review, a peer-reviewed journal for the Korean Academy of Urban Health, and as a member of the Academic Committee for the Alliance for Healthy Cities.
Dr Sunil Dubey
Sunil is a thought leader in innovation and smart cities and a practitioner in city strategy, development and international relations. Sunil holds a PhD in governance and public assets from the University of Sydney and has been an adjunct academic at the USYD and UNSW since 2008. Sunil holds a strategy and innovation position in the NSW Government, is an advisory member at ETI, Sorbonne University, Paris, and earlier served as Metropolis Ambassador and Advisor for Metropolis Org, 2007-18, where he represented over 120 member cities on the UN World Economic Forum and multilaterals including the World Bank. Sunil was a board member for the Geneva Foundation GPP, Citiscope (Reuters) and the Australian Institute of Urban Studies, an advisor for UN Compact Cities, an associate at ICS, UWS, and he has served as a jury member for international city awards and audit & peer review committees.
Professor Evelyne de Leeuw
Evelyne de Leeuw is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Cities Institute. She is a professor of public health at the School of Public Health at the University of Montreal (ESPUM) where she holds a ‘Canada Excellence in Research Chair’ in One Urban Health. She is also a professor of urban health and policy at UNSW Sydney. Her background is in public health and health promotion, cities, and health political science. She has been part of the European Healthy Cities movement since its launch in 1986. She has been editor for the journal Health Promotion International until 2023 and is an editor of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia in Global Public Health. Her current innovation efforts aim at the integration of (Indigenous) cosmology and spirituality, One Health, and Healthy Cities. Evelyne also currently acts as Vice-President of Scientific Affairs of the International Union of Health Promotion and Education, IUHPE. She is proud to have enabled Indigenous Voices and governance in some cutting-edge (multi-million dollar…) research projects in/with Eora, Wiradjuri, Yuwaalaraay, Yuin, and Gamilaraay Nations. She has published and edited eight scholarly books, over 300 peer reviewed papers and three novels.
Scientia Fellow Dr Naama Blatman
Dr Naama Blatman is a Scientia Fellow at the Cities Institute. She is an urban and political geographer whose research spans Israel/Palestine and Australia. She applies a comparative lens and collaborative research practice with Indigenous communities to interrogate the histories, lived realities and futures in-the-making of settler colonial cities. Naama examines how cities are planned and re/developed in such sites as housing, prisons, and railways, considering enduring yet dynamic structures of settler colonial and Indigenous urbanisms.
Naama is an alumnus of the Urban Studies Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship. She previously held the positions at Western Sydney University and at The University of Sydney. Prior to completing her PhD, she worked for several years in Human Rights and Palestinian non-for-profit organisations in Israel.