Meet Yurun Wang, a PhD candidate at Peking University.
In the fall of 2026, she will join CCL for a one-year visit at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) as a visiting student through the China Scholarship Council (CSC) Joint Training Programme.
Why did you decide to pursue a PhD? What is your research topic?
I decided to pursue a PhD because I have always been fascinated by how cities work through people’s everyday movements and interactions. My research focuses on human mobility, social influence, and urban complexity. In simple terms, I study how people’s movements in cities are influenced by others, how these influences spread through mobility networks, and how they may generate broader urban patterns. I am also interested in how large language models and LLM-based agents can help us better understand, simulate, and support complex urban systems, especially when studying human behavior, social interaction, and planning-related decision-making.
What do you enjoy the most about doing a PhD?
What I enjoy most is making predictions and thinking about how things may change in the future. In research, this means using data, models, and theory to understand emerging patterns and possible dynamics. This way of thinking also influences my daily life. I enjoy observing changes around me, making sense of them, and imagining how they might develop over time.
What brought you to CCL?
The questions I am asking are fundamentally about networked social systems: how people are connected, how influence travels, and how local interactions generate broader urban outcomes. This is why I was strongly attracted by CCL’s work on collective learning, complexity, and social systems.More broadly, I am interested in cities as a form of collective intelligence: millions of individuals make everyday decisions with limited information, yet these decisions can together produce adaptive patterns, shared routines, and sometimes unexpected system-level outcomes. CCL provides an inspiring environment for me to think more deeply about how such collective intelligence emerges, how it can be measured through mobility and interaction data, and how it may be supported through better urban policies and AI-based tools.
What do you expect from your time spent abroad?
A new taste of both research and life. I’m excited to experience a different academic environment, meet new people, and get fresh ideas for my own work. I also look forward to living in Toulouse and enjoying a different rhythm of daily life.
What do you think you’ll miss the most from home?
Probably delivery service. In China, you can get almost anything delivered very quickly, from meals and groceries to daily necessities. In some cities like Shenzhen, even drone food delivery is becoming a real thing, which makes daily life feel very convenient, and sometimes a little futuristic.
We wish Yurun a fruitful year with our group!