Dr. Lei Zou's research interests are mining geospatial Big Data to analyze and model human-environment interactions. He has involved in four National Science Foundation (NSF) funded projects and three projects funded by USGS, Louisiana Sea Grant, and Netherlands RAAK Public Grant. Increasingly frequent natural hazards and global environmental changes have posed huge challenges to the sustainability of human communities. Meanwhile, human behaviors are also changing the landscape and ecology of planet earth. Understanding the impacts and feedbacks between human and natural systems is the key to build a sustainable future for both systems. To build disaster resilience and long-term sustainability, his research focuses on (1) developing algorithms to derive practical indices from location-based social media data and utilizing those indices to enhance disaster resilience and emergency management; (2) applications of Deep Learning in automatic tagging and information extraction of social media data; (3) coupled natural-human system modeling for population dynamics, land loss and urban growth; and (4) developing estimation models of community resilience to multiple types of natural hazards.