About:
Zhen Lei is currently a professor of energy and environmental economics at Penn State. He has expertise in both economics and natural sciences, holding a Ph.D. degree in Agricultural & Resource Economics and a Ph.D. degree in Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. His research interests include energy and environmental economics, health economics, science and technology policy, economics of innovation and intellectual properties, big data and data science, industrial organization, development economics, and applied econometrics.
Research Highlights:
- NSF Award: CIVIC-FA Track A: Leveraging Existing Fiber-Optic Cables to Identify and Manage Urban Environmental Hazards.
Project Website: https://sites.psu.edu/pittsburghhazards/ - NSF Award: III:Small: Learning Latent Representations of Heterogeneous Information Networks. Project Website: https://sites.psu.edu/ipda/projects/nrl/
- Repurposing Center for Energy Transition (ReCET)
Project website: https://sites.psu.edu/recet/
Research Interests:
Lei conducts a policy-oriented, interdisciplinary and data-intensive research program at the nexus of energy and environment, public health, science and innovation, and big data. The three research themes that drive my work include: (1) Energy and environmental economics and policy, investigating firm strategies, consumer behavior, well-being including health of vulnerable and underserved communities, and government policies during energy transition; (2) Science and innovation policy, and intellectual property rights, focusing on institutions and policies (such as the patent system and university research and technology licensing) impacting innovations including those in energy, environment and critical materials; and (3) Data science and big data, applying data mining, learning and modeling to large data sets related to science and innovation (e.g., patents and publication datasets), energy and environment, and public health.
Lei has published papers in top general journals such as Nature and Nature Biotechnology, in top economics field journals including Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Journal of Public Economics and Energy Journal, and in top information and data science journals and conferences such as Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information (SIGIR), the Web Conference (WWW), and top technology law journals including Stanford Technology Law Review. His research has been supported by research grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Department of Energy (DOE), and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
- Fan Xia, Ximeng Cheng, Zhen Lei, Jintao Xu, Yu Liu, Yingxin Zhang, Qinghong Zhang, (2023). “Heterogeneous Impacts of Local Traffic Congestion on Local Air Pollution Within a City: Utilizing Taxi Trajectory Data,” Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 122, 102896.
- Travis Young, Jennifer Baka, Zhongyang He, Sekhar Bhattacharyya, Zhen Lei, (2023). “Mining, Loss, and Despair: Exploring Energy Transitions and Opioid Use in an Appalachian Coal Community,” Energy Research & Social Science, 2023, 99, 103046.
- Yingbo Li, Yigang Wei, Yan Li, Zhen Lei and Alessandra Ceriani, (2022). “Connecting Emerging Industry and Regional Innovation System: Linkages, Effect and Paradigm in China,” Technovation, 111, 102388.
- Zhen Sun, Zhen Lei, Brian D. Wright, Mark Cohen and Taoxiong Liu, (2021). “Government Targets, End-of-year Patenting Rush and Innovative Performance in China,” Nature Biotechnology, 39, 1068-1076.
- Zhihua Chen, Andrew N. Kleit, Zhen Lei, Haizhong An, Luis F. Ayala & Antoine J.C.J. Pruvot, (2020). “The linear-analog Method: A More Efficient and Effective Linearization Method for Natural Gas Transportation Optimization,” Journal of Natural Gas Science and Engineering, 80, 103305.
- Hui-Ju Hung, Wang-Chien Lee, Chih-Ya Shen, Fang He, Zhen Lei. (2024). “Leveraging Transfer Learning for Enhancing Graph Optimization Problem Solving,” The 28th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2024), 339-351, Tainan, Taiwan, May 7-10, 2024.
- Fang He, Wang-Chien Lee, Tao-Yang Fu, Zhen Lei, (2021). “CINES: Explore Citation Network and Event Sequences for Citation Forecasting,” The 44th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information (SIGIR ’21), 798-807, Virtual Event, Canada, July 11-15, 2021.
- Hui-Ju Hung, Wang-Chien Lee, De-Nian Yang, Chih-Ya Shen, Zhen Lei, and Sy-Miin Chow, (2020). “Efficient Algorithms towards Network Intervention,” The Web Conference 2020 (WWW ’20), 2021-2031, Taipei, Taiwan. April 2020.
For a full list of publications, please view the CV.