David Yu

Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering and Political Science

David Yu received his B.ASc. in Engineering Science at the Simon Fraser University and his M.P.P at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He obtained his Ph.D. in Sustainability at the School of Sustainability, Arizona State University.

Dr. Yu’s research centers on the resilience of highly-engineered social-ecological systems to unexpected, emergent shocks, and how biophysical and social context and institutional arrangements interact to shape system-level resilience. He studies these interactions to understand the conditions for building sustainable communities from local to global scales in the face of global change. Dr. Yu brings diverse knowledge sets together to engage in this research: systems thinking, collective action and the commons, and human behavior, among others. His research methods include mathematical and computation modeling, case study analysis, and behavioral experiments.