Currently as a PhD student at State University of New York, College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY ESF) for continuing education through a Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) at Boston Architectural College (BAC), Chien-Yu has honed increased skills which focus on strategies for mitigating environmental conditions in urban and developing regions. Chien-Yu also participated in research at SUNY ESF, BAC, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design (GSD), which Lin assisted in a faculty, Martha Schwartz, FASLA at GSD, and Lin's research interests focused on digital analysis, global warming and UHI. Furthermore, Lin served as a landscape designer at Halvorson Tighe & Bond Studio and assisted in diverse projects from proposals of climate change in Boston, public streetscape and plazas, residential housing to cemetery beatification etc. Stimulated by academic and practical experience, Lin has become interested in how to create effective modeling of comprehensive and cooperative workflow through digital software and algorithm systems. This work considers evaluation performance of environmental strategies and design typologies with a particular focus on the built environment.

Lin's MLA and current PhD, which included the practice lab built Lin's enthusiasm for such processes resulted in an ASLA Merit Award and The Edwin T. Steffian, ’10 (Hon.) Centennial Award, as well as instilled a collaborative approach to search for and share new knowledge. A publication involving Lin's role as a research team’s environmental analyst, using LadyBug tools, which is the environmental and algorithmic plugins in Grasshopper and Rhinoceros 3D modeling software, for the development of Site Information Modeling (SIM)/Landscape Information Modeling (LIM) systems, and documenting the process for generating these frameworks. The research has been aggregated and organized as the article: “Computational modeling for climate change: Simulating and visualizing a resilient landscape architecture design approach” that is published in the online journal, International Architectural Computing, in May, 2019.