Mingzhen Lu is Fellow in the Urban Expansion program at the Marron Insittute of Urban Management and an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at New York University. He is an ecologist and complexity scientist who seeks the simple rules that give rise to the complex dynamics of terrestrial ecosystems and their coupled human urban systems. His current work develops a general system-based theory that bridges ecosystem ecology and urban science. Before NYU, he was an Omidyar Complexity Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (2020-2023), where he applied toolkits from ecosystem ecology to study urban metabolism. He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University and a B.S. from Peking University.