Helena Rong

Helena Rong is Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Business at NYU Shanghai and Director of the Protopolis Lab. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and institutional researcher, her work examines how emerging technologies, from data-driven urban systems and blockchain networks to decentralized AI agents, are reshaping trust, governance, and collective life. Her research sits at the intersection of design, urban studies, decentralized governance, and AI, with particular attention to how social coordination is increasingly organized through platforms, protocols, infrastructures, and autonomous systems. She also serves as Research Director at Metagov, Curriculum Development Fellow at the Summer of Protocols supported by the Ethereum Foundation, and a Filecoin Foundation affiliate scholar at the University of San Francisco’s Center for Law, Tech, and Social Good.

Rong received a B.Arch from Cornell University, an SMArchS in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT, and a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University. Prior to joining NYU Shanghai, she led research on the financial value of architectural design at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab and co-authored the book Value of Design: Creating Agency Through Data-Driven Insights (2025). She also worked at the MIT Senseable City Lab on autonomous urban mobility. Later, as a Technology and Public Purpose Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, she expanded her focus to decentralized governance, digital commons, and the institutional implications of Web3 technologies for a policymaking audience.

Her current research focuses on blockchain governance, DAOs, decentralized AI, trust infrastructures, and the design of human–AI collective futures. Her work has appeared in journals and venues including JPER, Urban Informatics, Applied Geography, Landscape and Urban Planning, ACM CHI, ACM FAccT, ALife, among others. Her work has been recognized through awards and fellowships, including the Ida M. Green Fellowship, KPF Traveling Fellowship, and the Charles Goodwin Sands Memorial Medal. She has also taught at Harvard GSD and MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning. In addition to her academic work, Rong is the founder of CIVIS Design and Advisory, a design and research practice engaging in multi-scalar and interdisciplinary projects related to the built environment, and her design projects have been exhibited internationally, including at the Shenzhen Biennale and HDA Graz.

Select Publications

• Rong, H. (2025). Governing the Commons in Web 3.0? A Social Network Analysis of CityDAO and the Myth of Decentralization of Blockchain-Based Governance. Cryptoeconomic Systems, 4(1).
• Chegut, A., Kang, M., Rong, H., & Yang, J. (2025). Value of Design: Creating Agency Through Data-Driven Insights. ORO Editions.
• Rong, H., Davis, J., & Rada Orellana, M. (2025). Benchmarking large language models against qualitative coding and natural language processing in decoding public sentiment on urban upzoning. Urban Informatics, 4(17).
• Hu, B. A., & Rong, H. (2025). Spore in the Wild: Case Study on Spore.fun, a Real-World Experiment of Sovereign Agent Open-ended Evolution on Blockchain with TEEs. In Artificial Life Conference Proceedings 37.
• Hu, B. A., Chua, S., & Rong, H. (2026). Protocol Futuring: Speculating Second-Order Dynamics of Protocols in Sociotechnical Infrastructural Futures. ACM CHI 2026. 
   

Education

• PhD, Urban Planning
  Columbia University
• MS, Architecture and Urbanism
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Bachelor of Architecture
  Cornell University