Dr. Cynthia Zeng is an Assistant Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business in Abu Dhabi, and a research affiliate of the MIT Sloan School of Management. She completed her PhD in Operations Research from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Her research addresses the challenges of climate adaptation and sustainable development through technological innovation. She specializes in developing artificial intelligence solutions to forecast and manage extreme weather events. Her PhD thesis, titled “Multimodal Machine Learning for Climate Adaptation”, includes selected works on hurricanes prediction, flood prediction, near-term wind prediction, and flood insurance pricing.

In addition to academic pursuits, she gained valuable industry experience as a quantitative analyst at BlackRock Systematic Equities, generating alpha signals using data science; at the SoftBank Vision Fund, focusing on late-stage investments in AI tech unicorns. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Imperial College London.