Biosketch of Mei-Po Kwan

Mei-Po Kwan is Head of Chung Chi College, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management, Director of the Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, and Director of the Institute of Future Cities 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 (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.

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), and the Royal Geographical Society (UK). She 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. According to the list of the World's Top 2% Scientists by Stanford University, Kwan was ranked the world's no. 4 in the field of geography in 2022. Further, according to Research.com's ranking of top scientists by disciplines for 2021, she was ranked the Nation's no. 3 in Social Science and Humanities. In the 2023 Global Scholar Database's Lifetime Academic Impact List, Kwan ranked first nationally in the field of geography. She has received many 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$62.7 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 470 books, journal articles and book chapters. She has delivered over 400 keynote addresses, invited lectures and other invited presentations in more than 20 countries.