Liqing Peng
Assistant Professor
Professional Service
- Sino-British Fellowship Trust Visiting Fellow
- Doris Zimmern HKU-Cambridge Visiting Fellow
- Editorial Board Member, Communications Sustainability
- Associate Editor, Environment, Development and Sustainability
Liqing is an Assistant Professor at HKU and the founder of the APLUS Lab. She received her B.S. in Geosciences and B.A. in Philosophy from Peking University in 2013, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Engineering from Princeton University in 2019.
Liqing’s academic work bridges fundamental and applied research. She has developed transparent accounting methods for land-based greenhouse gas emissions, process-based models of forest carbon dynamics and agricultural water use, and policy tools that link human demand for food and wood products to climate outcomes. Her research has been published in leading journals such as Nature, Nature Sustainability, Nature Geoscience, Nature Food, and Global Change Biology.
Before joining HKU, Liqing served as Chief Modeler for the Food Program at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, D.C., where she built decision-support tools to guide carbon-neutral agriculture in Denmark and Africa. In this role, she collaborated with ecologists, GHG accounting experts, and a wide range of land-sector stakeholders from timber industry, food suppliers, and agricultural agencies.
Liqing’s research journey began with research on crop rotations and climate impacts on crop yields. Motivated by debates over whether climate change would make global land drier or wetter, she pursued doctoral studies in hydrology, where she investigated the drivers of terrestrial evapotranspiration and reconciled discrepancies between field observations, satellite retrievals, and large-scale models through physical modeling and data assimilation.
Chunyue Bai
PhD student
Chunyue received a B.S. in Forestry from Beijing Forestry University in 2021, and an M.S. in Environmental Science from Beijing Normal University in 2024. During her academic training, she developed a solid foundation in clean energy transition, policy assessment, ecosystem service accounting, and the estimation and mitigation of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Her current research interests mainly focus on agricultural carbon mitigation, sustainable agriculture, food security, and land-use change. She approaches these topics by integrating bottom-up assessments with remote sensing data, machine learning techniques, and process-based biophysical models.
Shihan Wang
PhD student
Shihan received a B.S. in Surveying and Mapping Engineering from Nanjing Forestry University in 2022, and an M.S. in Resource and Environment from Central South University in 2025. Throughout his academic training, he has developed a solid background in assessing global and regional terrestrial ecosystem carbon budgets and analyzing their driving factors. He is currently interested in investigating forest carbon dynamics following disturbances caused by human activities, drawing on integrated approaches that combine remote sensing and ground-based observations, machine learning techniques, and ecosystem process models.
Nuan Wen
Master student
Nuan Wen received a B.Eng. in Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering from Wuhan University in 2024. He focuses on comparing various PET calculation methods and evaluating their accuracy in responding to actual drought conditions.