Zhang Xiaoling is a Professor and the Director of the Smart and Sustainable City at Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. She is currently the Associate Editor of npj Urban Sustainability (Nature npj series) and Associate Editor of Land Use Policy. She is listed as the top 2% of the world’s most highly cited scientists. She works predominantly with the human and social dimensions of sustainable cities under climate change and strives to investigate and implement sustainable urban development practices in the global South from a technical, managerial and behavioral economics perspective. She has published over 200 SSCI/SCI papers, including Nature (Comment), Nature Food, Applied energy and others.