Biosketch of Mei-Po Kwan


Mei-Po Kwan is 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 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 and the neighborhood effect averaging problem. 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.

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), and the American Association of Geographers (AAG). She was named to the 2019 Highly Cited Researchers List compiled by the Web of Science Group as one of the world's most influential researchers. She has received many prestigious honors and awards, including 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$58.5 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 330 books, journal articles and book chapters. She has delivered over 340 keynote addresses, invited lectures and other invited presentations in more than 20 countries.



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Last updated on May 20, 2021.