Professor Mei-Po Kwan - "Deploying Advanced Geospatial Technologies and Methods in Human Mobility and Health Research”
The Speaker:
Professor Mei-Po Kwan is Head of Chung Chi College, Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management, and an affiliated faculty of the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Prof. Kwan is a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow of the U.K. Academy of Social Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Royal Geographical Society, the American Association of Geographers (AAG), and the Geographical Society of China. She received many prestigious awards and honors from the AAG, including the Distinguished Scholarship Honors, the Anderson Medal of Honors in Applied Geography, the Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography, the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography. Prof. Kwan has published about 500 journal articles, books, and book chapters. She has received research grants of more than USD 64.5 million and has delivered over 400 keynote addresses and invited lectures in more than 20 countries.
Prof. Kwan has made ground-breaking contributions to research on environmental health, human mobility, transport and health issues in cities, and geographic information science (GIScience). She discovered the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) and the neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP). She is a leading researcher in deploying real-time GPS tracking and mobile sensing to collect individual-level data in environmental health research. Her recent projects examine the health impacts of individual environmental exposure (e.g., noise, air pollution, green space), the protection of geoprivacy via the development of a Geospatial Virtual Data Enclave (GVDE), and the space-time dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic.
More information can be found at: http://www.meipokwan.org
Abstract:
Human mobility is an essential element of people’s spatiotemporal experiences, and these complex experiences cannot be fully understood by just looking at where people live. With the advent of new geospatial technologies and methods like GPS tracking and mobile sensing, a vast amount of complex spatiotemporal data can be collected and analyzed. However, human behaviors revealed by these data have not been fully understood. In this presentation, I discuss new methods developed for this purpose and draw upon recent conceptual and methodological developments to examine how a perspective that integrates the spatial and temporal dimensions and takes human mobility into account can help identify the relevant spatiotemporal context that influences people’s health behaviors or outcomes. Using examples from my recent projects, I discuss how the collection and analysis of high-resolution space-time data enabled by advanced geospatial and mobile technologies can provide new insights into the relationships between people’s health behaviors and the complex spatiotemporal dynamics of environmental influences.
Questions? Please email - senv.gsa@uq.edu.au