Ruichang Mao is an industrial-ecology researcher and former visiting doctoral researcher in the Urban Metabolism Lab. He completed his PhD at the University of Southern Denmark in 2021 and has continued research on the material metabolism of urban built environments, transport infrastructure and future resource demand in China.

His work combines bottom-up material-stock accounting, geographic information systems, material-flow analysis and life-cycle assessment. It examines how construction materials accumulate across and within cities and how infrastructure expansion generates embodied carbon and long-term resource dependencies. Studies of global subway systems and China’s high-speed railway network demonstrate the value of linking spatial development patterns with material stocks and greenhouse-gas emissions. His visiting research at the Lab contributed to comparative discussions of urban metabolism and the use of stock-and-flow evidence in planning for circular and lower-carbon built environments.