Jielu (Jenny) Zhang

Jielu (Jenny) Zhang is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University. She holds a Ph.D. in Geography and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Georgia. With a strong interdisciplinary background, her research focuses on developing geospatial artificial intelligence (GeoAI) methods for public health applications. Dr. Zhang specializes in explainable AI, spatial causal inference, and spatio-temporal optimization of healthcare services. She has led NIH-funded projects, including the development of SpaCE, a model estimating spatial risk factors for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA), and SpatialCausal, a deep learning framework for identifying causal effects across geographic areas. Her work has been published in journals such as International Journal of Geographical Information Science, Journal of the American Heart Association, and Circulation. She also developed an optimization model for AED placement and is currently exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for predicting and explaining health outcomes using in-context learning.