Photo of Takahiro Yabe

Dr. Takahiro Yabe is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Technology Management and Innovation (TMI) and the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP). His research focuses on computational social science and netwrok science approaches to model the resilience of cities to disasters, pandemics, and disruptive mobility technology, and has published in journals including, PNASNature Communications, and Nature Machine Intelligence. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) and the MIT Media Lab with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland and Esteban Moro. He obtained his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 2021, and his MS and BS from the University of Tokyo in 2017 and 2015, respectively.  

Research Interests
Computational Social Science
Urban Resilience
Human Mobility
Inequality and Segregation
Socioeconomic Networks

Postdoc, Massachusetts Insititute of Technology (2021 - 2023)

Ph.D., Purdue University (2017 - 2021)

MS, The University of Tokyo (2015 - 2017)

Bachelor of Engineering, The University of Tokyo (2011 - 2015) 


  • Vice Presidential Unit Award (2022), The World Bank, to GFDRR mobility data analytics team
  • Top 10% Citation Award (2021), PLoS ONE, for “Cross-comparative analysis of evacuation behavior after earthquakes using mobile phone data”
  • Doctoral “Systems” Fellowship (2018 – 2020), Purdue University
  • STV Civil Engineering Graduate Assistantship Endowment Award (2020), Lyles School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University

  • Yabe, T., Bueno, B. G. B., Dong, X., Pentland, A., & Moro, E. (2023). Behavioral changes during the COVID-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters. Nature Communications14(1), 2310.
  • Yabe, T., Rao, P. S. C., Ukkusuri, S. V., & Cutter, S. L. (2022). Toward data-driven, dynamical complex systems approaches to disaster resilience. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences119(8), e2111997119.
  • Yabe, T., Jones, N. K., Rao, P. S. C., Gonzalez, M. C., & Ukkusuri, S. V. (2022). Mobile phone location data for disasters: A review from natural hazards and epidemics. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems94, 101777. 
  • Yabe, T., Tsubouchi, K., Fujiwara, N., Sekimoto, Y., & Ukkusuri, S. V. (2020). Understanding post-disaster population recovery patterns. Journal of the Royal Society Interface17(163), 20190532.
  • Yabe, T., Tsubouchi, K., Fujiwara, N., Wada, T., Sekimoto, Y., & Ukkusuri, S. V. (2020). Non-compulsory measures sufficiently reduced human mobility in Tokyo during the COVID-19 epidemic. Scientific reports10(1), 18053.