Jing Yao is a Lecturer in Urban Big Data and Quantitative Methods at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. She is also a member of the ESRC funded Urban Big Data Centre.

Her research interests cover a wide range of areas in geographic information science, including spatial analysis, spatial statistics, spatial modeling, and spatial optimization, etc.

Currently, she focuses on developing quantitative methods for spatially integrated analysis and modeling and their applications particularly in facility location selection, land-use planning and health research. She is a Co-I within SHLC with a remit for co-ordinating capacity strengthening particularly on quantitative method training as well as GIS-based spatial analysis. Before joining Glasgow, she worked as a research fellow at the Centre for Geoinformatics at University of St Andrews in the UK.