Urban Design Science for Health Lab

The Urban Design Science for Health Lab combines research programme development, postgraduate training, international collaboration and service to the wider scientific community. Its leadership approach is centred on building sustained areas of research rather than isolated urban design projects. It aims to connect urban design science with population health.

The programme builds on an established academic record across multiple countries and disciplines. It brings together empirical research, methodological development and emerging approaches to address questions concerning built environments, human behaviour and health.

Research Programme Development

The lab develops interconnected research streams across urban environments and population health, active living and mobility, workplace health, public space and health equity, and the scientific development of urban design. These areas provide a common foundation for individual projects while allowing new questions and methods to emerge within a coherent programme.

Competitive research funding has supported this wider programme across different stages of its development. Principal-investigator funding has included grants from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and a Heart Foundation of Australia Postdoctoral Fellowship. The broader research record also includes participation in multi-institutional projects supported through Japanese and Australian research funding programmes.

Research development increasingly extends beyond documenting associations between environmental characteristics and health. Current work also considers how evidence can be translated into more spatially specific knowledge for urban design and how emerging approaches, including parametric methods and artificial intelligence, can be evaluated within established scientific principles.

Postgraduate Research Leadership

Postgraduate research training is a major component of the lab. Master’s and doctoral projects address questions across urban design, built environments, population health, spatial methods and emerging digital approaches.

Research supervision is structured to develop both substantive and methodological expertise. Students are encouraged to formulate clearly defined research questions, select methods appropriate to those questions and critically evaluate what their findings can and cannot support.

The wider academic record underpinning the lab includes primary and collaborative supervision of master’s and doctoral researchers, completed postgraduate degrees, thesis examination and participation in doctoral committees. This experience spans urban planning, urban design, public health, spatial research and interdisciplinary health-related topics.

Teaching and Research Training

Research leadership is complemented by teaching across urban design, health, environmental geography and design studies. Teaching activities have included courses and invited instruction on built environments and public health, geographical aspects of health, physical environmental geography, urban design and active living, design cognition and creative processes in design.

These activities support a broader educational objective: developing researchers who can work across disciplinary boundaries while maintaining methodological rigour. This is particularly important in built environment and health research, where questions often require simultaneous understanding of spatial characteristics, human behaviour and population-level evidence.

Academic and Scientific Service

The research programme is accompanied by sustained service to the international scientific community. Current editorial-board roles include Landscape and Urban Planning, npj Exercise Medicine & Health, Clinical eHealth and Heart & Mind.

The wider academic service record includes reviewing more than 200 manuscripts across approximately 100 journals in urban studies, public health, environmental research, geography, transportation and related disciplines. It also includes assessment of competitive research funding for organisations in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Singapore and Serbia, as well as external evaluation for academic promotion.

These activities provide engagement with research beyond the lab’s own programme and contribute to the assessment and development of scholarship across several connected fields.

International Academic Engagement

International engagement is integral to the lab’s development. Research collaborations and academic exchanges connect the programme with scholars and research groups across Asia, Australia and the Americas.

The wider academic record includes more than 100 invited lectures, seminars and workshops delivered across academic and professional settings. Topics have ranged from urban design and population health to public open space, active living, spatial methods and the scientific development of urban design.

International engagement also contributes directly to research training. Exposure to different disciplinary traditions, geographical settings and methodological approaches provides opportunities to test whether concepts and findings remain meaningful beyond individual studies or locations.

Building a Sustainable Research Programme

The long-term objective is to develop a research environment in which scientific outputs, postgraduate training, methodological innovation and international collaboration reinforce one another. The lab therefore approaches research leadership not simply as the production of individual publications, but as the development of cumulative knowledge, researchers and collaborations around a clearly defined intellectual programme.

This approach supports the continuing development of urban design science as a rigorous interdisciplinary field and provides a foundation for research capable of contributing across urban design, planning, population health and related disciplines.