Yuxi Cai

Yuxi Cai has focused on environmental microbial exposure and its determinants in her multi-scale study of social and physical environment’s impact on health effects and the moderation mechanisms of pollution, microbial exposure and physical activities.

Her research interests have originated from her passion in public health and her perspective of three-dimensional spatial thinking cultivated in her undergraduate architecture background. She has innovatively used three-dimensional spatial characteristics as research variables, such as building height and floor area ratio, and included the wind environment and lighting conditions formed by these spatial characteristics into her study.

With her interdisciplinary education background and expertise of GIS, she has conducted research aimed at sustainable urban public health security by a physical environment reducing the transmission risk assisted with behavioral control policies. Seeing the epidemic explosion worldwide revealed that the existing planning was hard to cope with the long-term and recurrent transmission characteristics of COVID-19, her research team decided to clarify the impact mechanism of the urban built environment on the transmission risk of the epidemic and formulated resilient prevention and control measures at the planning level.

In the USC Population, Health and Place Ph.D. program, she looks forward to taking the next steps in understanding environmental determinants for health disparities and making science-based policy contributions for the sustainability and health equity of the urban environment affected by climate change.

Master of Town and Country Planning Engineering, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, China

Bachelor of Architecture, School of Architecture and Planning, Hunan University, China

Wang, L., Jia, Y., Wu, J., Cai, Y., Guo, Q., Sun, W., … & Shi, T. (2023). The effect of greenness on ESKAPE pathogen reduction and its heterogeneity across global climate zones and urbanization gradient. Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 87, 128048.

Wang, L., Sun, W., Moudon, A. V., Zhu, Y. G., Wang, J., Bao, P., … & Cai, Y. (2022). Deciphering the impact of urban built environment density on respiratory health using a quasi-cohort analysis of 5495 non-smoking lung cancer cases. Science of The Total Environment, 850, 158014.

Presenter: “A Comparative Study on the Adaptability of Health Impact Assessment Tools towards Urban Planning”. 5th World Planning Schools Congress-16th Asian Planning Schools Association Congress, September 2022, Bali, Indonesia.