tbc, by Mei-Po Kwan (CUHK - Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Mei-Po Kwan is Head of Chung Chi College, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management, and Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She received her MA degree in Urban Planning in 1989 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and her PhD in 1994 in Geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Kwan has made paradigm-shifting contributions to research on geographic information science, environmental health, human mobility, and transport/health issues in cities. She discovered the uncertain geographic context problem (UGCoP) and the neighborhood effect averaging problem (NEAP), which question the existing knowledge in neighborhood effect research based on residence-based approaches and led to a shift to the mobility-based paradigm in environmental exposure assessment. Kwan is a pioneer and a leading researcher in deploying real-time GPS tracking and mobile sensing to collect high-resolution, individual-level data to mitigate exposure measurement errors due to the UGCoP and the NEAP. Her work has inspired much new mobility-based research in public health, sociology, health geography, and urban studies on a wide range of topics including the health impacts of individual exposure to green space, air pollution, noise, traffic congestion, social environments, and ethnic/racial segregation. 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 American Association of Geographers (AAG), the Royal Geographical Society (UK), and the Geographical Society of China. She ranked first in China in the field of geography in the 2023 Global Scholar Database's Lifetime Academic Impact List. She ranked the world's no. 5 in the field of geography in 2024 according to the list of the World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University. Kwan was named to the 2019 and 2021 Highly Cited Researchers Lists compiled by the Web of Science Group as one of the world's most influential researchers. Kwan received two Lifetime Achievement Awards (one from the International Geographical Union in 2023 and the other from the International Association of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Sciences in 2024). She has received many other prestigious honors and awards, including the James R. Anderson Medal of Honor in Applied Geography, the Distinguished Scholarship Honors, the Wilbanks Prize for Transformational Research in Geography, and the Stanley Brunn Award for Creativity in Geography from the AAG. Kwan had served as an editor of Annals of the American Association of Geographers for 12 years. She has received over US$68.8 million grant support from sources including the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council. She has published over 530 books, journal articles and book chapters. She has delivered over 400 keynote addresses, invited lectures and other invited presentations in more than 20 countries.