A rare blend of technical mastery and visionary ambition, Cynthia Zeng is one of those brilliant minds drawn to the unknown. She envisions solutions most of us can't yet imagine—Zeng is pioneering AI technology capable of predicting severe weather months or even years in advance. Her mission is to give countries actionable information to save lives and prevent years of costly rebuilding after natural disasters.
“My deep love for technology drives me—it’s the language through which I connect with the world,” said Zeng, Assistant Professor of Technology, Operations, and Statistics at NYU Abu Dhabi’s Stern School of Business. “My goal is to develop solutions that create a lasting positive impact on the world. I believe I am in a fortunate position to provide life-saving extreme weather event predictions that can inform decision-makers on resource allocation, city and infrastructure planning, and disaster response. Advance warning on floods, droughts, wildfires, and earthquakes in vulnerable regions like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, or the Fiji Islands where the impact of extreme weather is devastating, can help save lives and property and protect fragile industries and livelihoods."
Zeng’s journey began in high school when she volunteered with her mother’s environmental non-profits in China, working with farmers in the country’s remote mountain region, the home of famous pandas, ignited her lifelong passion for driving social impact.
Zeng pursued a PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), initially focusing on using AI in healthcare and predicting patient outcomes.
A turning point came in 2022 when Zeng attended a public lecture just down the street from MIT at Harvard University about flooding in Pakistan. That year, 33 million people in Pakistan were struggling to survive as water overtook towns and villages, devastating already impoverished and vulnerable populations.
One of the country’s ministers spoke at Harvard about policies and ways the country addressed flooding. Zeng asked the spokeswoman if Pakistan used technology to predict this natural disaster. The official asked Zeng a question in return. “Can you forecast flooding for us? Because we badly need it,” Zeng remembered. Those words struck Zeng with a transformative idea: what if AI could forecast floods and other extreme weather events long before they occur so that impacted areas have the opportunity to plan and prevent them if possible?
“With climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and severe. I realized there’s very little existing research leveraging AI to tackle these challenges, which makes the work both challenging and exciting,’ Zeng explained. “I figured I could adapt some technological expertise I developed in healthcare. For example, instead of predicting a patient’s likelihood of developing lung complications, I now forecast a region’s probability of experiencing a major flood. At their core, both are data problems.”
Zeng’s research focuses on building algorithms to synthesize diverse data types - images, text, numerical data, and historical weather records - to build probabilistic predictions for a wide range of disaster risks, including droughts, floods, wildfires, and earthquakes. In addition to Zeng’s advancements in AI capabilities, timely, consistent, reliable, and geographically comprehensive data collection, storage, and retrieval methods remain an important and challenging component of the solution.
Zeng chose NYU Abu Dhabi and its Stern School of Business as the perfect place to continue her groundbreaking work.
“Abu Dhabi is a fast-growing hub, and I am drawn by its entrepreneurial spirit and ambition to become a global AI center and a sustainability leader.”
The impact of Zeng’s work extends beyond disaster forecasting, with potential applications in areas like insurance pricing, resilient supply chain management, and urban planning. Her ultimate passion is to use AI to uplift developing regions bearing climate change’s harshest impacts. Combining bold vision and cutting-edge technology, Cynthia Zeng is at the forefront of climate resilience. Her work doesn’t just predict the future—it empowers the world to prepare for it.
