About
79
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Introduction
How does the built environment impact human health, and how can we design places that support human functioning and enhance human well-being? As a researcher, I explore the human-environment relationships, especially the mental health benefits of exposure to urban nature using measures and approaches from geography, psychology, and public health. As a designer, I apply my research findings to support interdisciplinary evidence-based design that addresses pressing issues such as climate change, environmental health and equity.
Additional affiliations
January 2018 - present
August 2016 - May 2017
Education
August 2011 - June 2016
Field of study
- Landscape Architecture (focused on environmental health)
Publications
Publications (79)
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is the fastest growing developmental disorder in countries across the world. Although recent studies have demonstrated the health benefits of nature for typically developing children and children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, it is unclear whether these benefits extend to children with ASD. In this st...
Recently, an emerging body of literature has examined the relationships between early life nature exposure and mental health in later life; however, no critical synthesis yet exists regarding the extent and strength of these relationships. This study presents the first systematic review of studies in this growing area. Following the PRISMA framewor...
Background.
Although the literature has reported increases in the prevalence of mental distress after natural disasters, less is known about the role the environment may play in mitigating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in hurricane-impacted communities.
Aim.
This study aims to investigate the extent to which concentration and perceived qu...
As climate change exerts wide ranging health impacts, there is a surge of interest in the associations between climatic factors and mental and behavioral disorders (MBDs). Existing quantitative syntheses focus mainly on heat and high temperature exposure, neglecting the effects of other climatic factors and their synergies. The objective of this st...
The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the daily lives of people, and countries worldwide have implemented public health measures that restricted social contact and interactions. Individuals in isolation displayed increased mental health issues, for whom windows are a crucial means of connecting with the outside world. However, few studies have discusse...
Plan Integration for Extreme Urban Heat
Understanding tourists’ spatial distribution and subgroups is important for urban tourism planning and management. This study utilized mobile signaling data from 21 million equipments to examine the tourist spots travelers visited and their movements in the city of Shanghai. In addition, we used latent profile analysis (LPA) to identify potential t...
Vegetation is an essential natural feature in urban greening and a crucial indicator of an advanced city; it also enhances people’s quality of life. The maintenance of vegetation with wide coverage in an urban park is crucial. However, few studies have discussed the effects of vegetation quality and quantity on human health. The current study discu...
Urban SVF and GVI were highly consistent between deep learning and manual classification. • SVF has a significant positive effect on PET and TSV during both the hot and cool seasons. • GVI has a significant negative effect on the objective thermal comfort index PET during both the hot and cool seasons. • SVF has a significant positive effect on per...
Heatwaves and air pollution have become global public health concerns. These environmental hazards are estimated to cause 250,000 annual and 4.2 million total deaths between 2030 and 2050, respectively. South Asia is particularly vulnerable to these impacts. This region has experienced prolonged heatwaves and high annual temperatures, as well as th...
Background
Despite the growing research on environment-physical activity (PA) relationships, field experimental studies are limited. Such studies offer opportunities to focus on real-world environmental exposure and related PA and health outcomes, allowing researchers to better isolate the causal effect of exposures/interventions. Focusing on the s...
The built environment has been increasingly shown to impact mental health. However, little is known about how and the extent to which exposure to greenspace in the residential environment is associated with emergency department visits for mental disorders. In addition, despite recent findings highlighting the links between historical discriminatory...
Background:
Studies on the health effects of heat are particularly limited in Texas, the U.S. state with the top ten highest number of annual heat-related deaths per capita from 2018 to 2020. This study aims to assess the effects of heat on all-cause and cause-specific mortality in 12 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) across Texas from 1990 to...
The rapidly advancing knowledge of the interactions between people and their environment provides opportunities for designers to practice evidence-based landscape architecture (EBLA) in designing outdoor spaces. Recent studies have proposed some characteristics of successful EBLA projects, including the following: amicable skepticism; the questioni...
Road traffic accidents are among the top 10 causes of death globally. With regard to potential accidents, if driver reaction time (RT) can be reduced, drivers would have more time to assess the situation and take appropriate action to avoid the accident. As natural elements in the environment can restore human attention, we conducted a random contr...
Growing research has found that exposing patients to forest landscapes through technology improves their health. However, studies on the effects of nature therapy sessions on particularly vulnerable groups that require frequent regular treatment such as patients of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is lacking. This study aims to understand the effects o...
Rapid urbanization and high-density development are major drivers of global warming. The associations of spatial landscape patterns with urban thermal environments have been extensively investigated. Meanwhile, quantifying the cooling effects of landscape patterns on street-level outdoor thermal comfort has been less attempted. This study examined...
Residents of public or subsidized housing experience social and environmental disadvantages and are therefore particularly vulnerable to disasters. Although research has highlighted risks associated with common disasters, such as floods and heatwaves, to date little is known about the impacts of infrequent disasters, such as a winter storm in a sub...
Nature deficit poses critical developmental challenges to the future generations. Louv, for example, stated that children needs adequate nature exposure for healthy development of their sense, learning, and creativity. However, it remains unknown whether individuals having various levels of nature access during childhood may develop different senso...
Urban parks can bring multiple health benefits to seniors and thus are important to their lives. This study investigated seniors’ spatial distribution, preferred activity zones, and activity intensity during park visits. We used GPS trackers to collect spatial location information and accelerometers to record metabolic equivalent of energy (MET) at...
Excessive amounts of neighbourhood vacant land and abandoned structures can significantly lower community and outsider perceptions, and ultimately impact the mental health conditions of inhabitants. While depopulation, economic conditions and land use dynamics can all play a role in the amount of neighbourhood-scaled vacancies and structural abando...
There is a growing and critical need to develop solutions for communities that are at particular risk of the impacts of the nexus of hazardous substances and natural disasters. In urban areas at high risk for flooding and lacking proper land-use controls, communities are vulnerable to environmental contamination from industrial land uses during flo...
The notion of social segregation refers to the degrees of separation between socially different population groups. Many studies have examined spatial and residential separations among different socioeconomic or racial populations. However, with the advancement of transportation and communication technologies, people’s activities and social interact...
The COVID-19 pandemic has limited people’s visitation to public places because of social distancing and shelter-in-place orders. According to Google’s community mobility reports, some countries showed a decrease in park visitation during the pandemic, while others showed an increase. Although government responses played a significant role in this v...
Excess heat in urban environments is an increasing threat to human health and well-being. Furthermore, the increasingly important phenomenon of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) is exacerbating problems of livability in urban centers. Hence, there should be an increasing effort to assess the impact of heat mitigation strategies (HMSs) on outdoor thermal...
Trait emotional intelligence reflects a set of self-perceptions and behavioral tendencies to empathize with others and manage one's own emotions. Trait emotional intelligence is a valuable characteristic since it can aid social interaction, bolster subjective wellbeing, and predict career success. Past research suggests that brief exposures to gree...
Global climate change and urban heat island intensification are making many cities dangerously hot during heat waves. There is a need for a clear process for applying microclimate information in urban design to create cooler cities. A recent paper points out the gaps in research methodology and suggests the need for implementation-oriented research...
Current trends in flood event frequency, neighborhood flood vulnerability, and pollutant loads in runoff due to development are all projected to increase due to population growth and climate change effects. Neighborhood-scale green infrastructure (GI) has shown capabilities to help mitigate impacts from flood events and decrease contamination level...
Global climate change has increased the risks of extreme weather-related disasters, leading to severe public health burdens. In February 2021, Winter Storm Uri brought severe cold to southern United States and caused unprecedented health and safety concerns. Residents in subsidized rental housing were among the most vulnerable to cold stress during...
Social media plays increasingly significant roles in disaster response, but effectively leveraging social media for rescue is challenging. This study analyzed rescue requests on Twitter during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey, in which many residents resorted to social media to call for help. The objectives include (1) understanding the characteristics of...
Previous studies have shown that natural environments and leisure activities can reduce depression and increase well-being. Urban parks are important for the psychological well-being of middle-aged and older adults. However, it remains unknown whether the relationship between environmental perceptions, leisure activity, and well-being is affected b...
Our capacity to pay attention—to employ top-down attention by directing our focus toward one idea or task while excluding from our consciousness a host of competing stimuli and thoughts—is key to every human achievement. But top-down attention is a limited resource that fatigues with use. Research demonstrates that having contact with nature, even...
Place-based structural inequalities can have critical implications for the health of vulnerable populations. Historical urban policies, such as redlining, have contributed to current inequalities in exposure to intra-urban heat. However, it is unknown whether these spatial inequalities are associated with disparities in heat-related health outcomes...
Heat related morbidity and mortality, especially during extreme heat events, are increasing due to climate change. More Americans die from heat than from all other natural disasters combined. Identifying the populations and locations that are under high risk of heat vulnerability is important for urban planning and design policy making as well as h...
This study examined the effects of the behavioral, environmental, and intermediate attributes of greenways on the well-being of older adults, especially regarding how place attachment can serve as an intermediate factor in achieving aging in place. Data were obtained from environmental evaluations and user surveys of 769 participants aged 55 and ol...
The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic has stimulated intensive research interest in its transmission pathways and infection factors, e.g., socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, climatology, baseline health conditions or pre-existing diseases, and government policies. Meanwhile , some empirical studies suggested that built environment attri...
Physical activity provides multiple health benefits to seniors, and urban parks are one of the primary settings where seniors engage in physical activity. However, seniors’ park-based physical activity and their needs related to park environmental characteristics are not well understood. This study aimed to explore associations between the intensit...
Physical activity brings multiple health benefits to seniors. Neighborhood parks provide seniors with accessible spaces and opportunities to engage in physical activity. This study investigated the associations between neighborhood park design characteristics and seniors' total walking step and energy expenditure during the park visit. Seniors' tot...
The 2020 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture Conference (review)
Communities adjacent to concentrated areas of industrial land use (CAILU) are exposed to elevated levels of pollutants during flood disasters. Many CAILU are also characterized by insufficient infrastructure, poor environmental quality, and socially vulnerable populations. Manchester, TX is a marginalized CAILU neighborhood proximate to several pet...
Healthy aging is a global health priority. Urban parks and green space have been demonstrated to provide mental health benefits to older adults. Despite growing interest in prescribing nature and park visits by physicians, we do not know what type of park visit is most effective for the psychological benefits. This lack of knowledge prevents planne...
The rental housing market plays a critical role in the United States real estate market. In addition, rent changes are also indicators of urban transformation and social phenomena. However, traditional data sources for market rent prediction are often inaccurate or inadequate at covering large geographies. With the development of housing informatio...
Background:
Advancement in location-aware technologies, and information and communication technology in the past decades has furthered our knowledge of the interaction between human activities and the built environment. An increasing number of studies have collected data regarding individual activities to better understand how the environment shap...
A growing body of literature has explored the psychological benefits associated with contact with nature. Many studies have employed experimental designs that compared various levels of nature exposure, or have used exogenous neighborhood-based measures of nature. The exact places where adolescents visit, as well as their street-level experiences w...
A growing number of studies have used standalone GPS or smartphones to track where people move and the environment to which they expose. In the same time, questionnaire, survey, and travel diaries have been used to capture people’s perception, emotions, and interactions with the nearby environment. The growing volume of qualitative data together wi...
As urban tourism becomes an indispensable part of urban dynamics, tourist attractions are increasingly woven into residents' everyday living spaces. However, the spatial patterns of, and level of mix between tourist and local attractions have remained largely unknown. Taking advantage of the recent development in volunteered geographic information,...
Many urban areas affected by flood disasters
are also becoming increasingly ecologically and
socially fragmented due to the accumulation
of vacant properties. While redevelopment
is often viewed as the primary objective in
regenerating vacant properties, they can also
potentially provide ecological and hydrological
land uses. Rather than chasing de...
echnological shifts in instructional delivery have increased the number of online courses and programs available in higher education. In the design fields, many traditional lecture-based courses have been converted to online formats in an effort to bolster student enrollment numbers, increase weighted student credit hours, and help with recruitment...
Purpose:
Sedentary behavior, characterized by a sitting or reclining posture and low-energy expenditure, has been recognized as an independent health risk factor. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to examine the association between sedentary behavior and sleep problems.
Method:
Keyword and reference search were performed in PubM...
This study examines where children play in a city undergoing rapid urbanization
and how they perceive these places. Three hundred twenty-seven children
aged 10 to 13 in Yantai, China engaged in web-based participatory mapping
to identify play places and bad places and to provide perceptions about
these places. Results showed that play places were c...
Although it is well established that viewing nature can help individuals recover from a stressful experience, the dose-response curve describing the relationship between tree cover density and stress recovery is totally unclear. A total of 160 participants engaged in a standard Trier Social Stress Test to induce stress. Participants were then rando...
Questions
Questions (8)
Hey we are designing an ecological momentary assessment, where the questions are not triggered by time/activity, but the geolocation of the participant. We would like to predefine a few areas, and trigger questions once users enter a new area. I've only heard that MetricWire is promising and I am trying to schedule a meeting with them. I know there are a lot of new EMA apps out there and wonder if anyone knows another app that can serve our purpose? Thank you very much!
Hey we are designing an ecological momentary assessment, where the questions are not triggered by time/activity, but the geolocation of the participant. We would like to predefine a few areas, and trigger questions once user enter a new area. I've only heard that MetricWire is promising and I am trying to schedule a meeting with them. I know there are a lot of new EMA apps out there and wonder if anyone knows another app that can serve our purpose? Thank you very much!
Can someone recommend some good sources that summarize the response rates of household surveys in the United States? I am looking for relatively recent sources, social science or health oriented surveys (not political or branding), and ideally using multi-mode surveys (e.g., mail, telephone, face-to-face). Doesn't have to be national surveys. Local ones are fine.
My continuous variable has a lot of observations on the leftmost and rightmost tails but not so many in the middle. Is there a transformation that is recommended, or should I segment the data into an ordinal/binary one?
We are doing some research on Bonn's urban structure and historical buildings/ neighborhoods/ destinations. We would like to find all sorts of GIS data for Bonn (e.g., topography, building footprint, streets, land use and land cover, sociodemographics). Web searching has been challenging for us, as we don't speak German. Can someone recommend some web pages where open data can be found? Thank you!
I am designing a study looking at mental health outcomes of a population that had a certain exposure a year ago. While modeling the growth curve of the mental health outcome as related to the degree of initial exposure, I would also like to model the influences of some external factors that evolve/ take place in the next few years on the health outcome. So my study involves a panel survey to be administered a few times in the next few years, with an additional questionnaire for the 1st round that requires participants to recall their initial exposure. Should I call this a combined retrospective and prospective study? Can anyone recommend some texts that define/ describe/ comment on similar research designs (survey design, methodology, or empirical examples)? Thank you very much!
I've used some R packages (e.g. rgdal) to do data analyses and written a manuscript about the research. I would like to know what is the correct way to cite the packages. I've found that for some packages, on the CRAN index page there is a "citation" link that points to publications, but for others, there is no such information. Can someone provide information regarding citing R packages in APA?
In planning and design, engagement projects often involve community meetings and charrattes, and we have some ideas about how to stimulate participation and get people really engaged in conversations and actions. Is there a survey or scale that can measure the success or effectiveness of the meetings? Say, if we randomly assign people to two meetings aiming at discussing design solutions for a regeneration project, one with maps, trace paper, stickers, pictures and one with only maps. How can we tell if the former one is more effective than the latter?
