Yi Victor Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Earth, Computing, Human and Observing at Chapman University.
Currently, Wang is the leading researcher in a project sponsored by the Korea Meteorological Administration to characterize and analyze variables of radar products in estimating and nowcasting heavy rainfall with machine learning methodologies. He is the first scholar to generalize knowledge in an emerging research area called hazard equivalency and to empirically study and model the equivalency of hazard strengths within a multi-hazard context. Wang is also the leading scholar who proposes an empirical predictive modeling approach to quantifying community vulnerability to disasters considering societal and environmental characteristics given hazard strength for risk prediction.
Previously, Wang served as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. He started his academic career in disaster research with a successful pursuit of his bachelor’s degree in applied disaster and emergency studies at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada. He received his master’s degree in disaster science and management from the University of Delaware. He earned his PhD in civil engineering with the direction of societal risk Management at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
In addition to academic life, Wang is an ultra-marathon runner and a 2:48 marathon runner.