Project Background and Aims
Human health and wellbeing are shaped not only by genetics and individual behaviours, but also by the characteristics of the places in which people live, work and travel. Understanding how these places influence health is becoming increasingly important in addressing major societal challenges, including climate change, urbanisation, health inequalities and population ageing. Advances in Earth Observation are transforming our ability to measure these characteristics consistently across space and time, creating new opportunities to generate timely, spatially detailed evidence that supports public health research, policy and practice.
Contemporary Earth Observation missions provide continuous observations of the Earth's surface, enabling the measurement of characteristics such as greenspace, urban form, land surface temperature, air quality proxies, flooding, vegetation dynamics and landscape change. Despite these advances, important challenges remain in translating these observations into robust, interpretable and actionable measures of health-relevant exposures.
This PhD will investigate how characteristics of places influence human health and wellbeing, and how Earth Observation and geospatial data can be used to better understand these relationships. The project is intentionally flexible and will be developed collaboratively with the successful candidate. Potential research areas include healthy cities, climate and health, health inequalities, greenspace, air quality, heat exposure, active travel, healthy ageing and other place-based determinants of health.
The successful candidate will receive interdisciplinary training in Earth Observation, geospatial analysis, spatial data science and public health research. The project will be developed collaboratively with the supervisory team and adapted to the successful candidate's interests, background and expertise.
