Research

Main Research focuses:

Environmental planning and environmental justice.
Environmental determinants of health.
Impacts of historical discriminatory housing policies on environment and health.

Others: Urban Mobility Patterns, Housing Market, Urban Policy, Urban Redevelopment, Urban Crimes, Cardiovascular Health, Mental Health, Adverse Birth Outcomes

Methods:

GIS, Spatial Statistics, Causal Inference, Machine Learning

1. Environmental Planning & Environmental Justice

Wei, H. (2024) Roots of urban equality: Are low-income neighborhoods paying more for street trees?. Landscape and Urban Planning, 247, 105045.
Wei, H., Huang, X., Wang, S., Lu, J., Li, Z., & Zhu, L. (2023) A Data-Driven Investigation on Park Visitation and Income Mixing of Visitors in New York City. Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science.
Chukwu, M., Huang, X., Wang, S., Li, X., & Wei, H. (2024) Urban park accessibility assessment using human mobility data: a systematic review. Annals of GIS, 30(2), 181-198.
Lu, J., Xiao, X., Huang, X., Chuai, X., Li, Z., Wei, H., & Wang, S. (2024) Big data insights into urban park use in the pandemic: Changes in visitation patterns and exacerbated social inequalities in the US. Cities, 152, 105204.
Lu, J., Huang, X., Kupfer, J. A., Xiao, X., Li, Z., Wei, H., Wang, S., & Zhu, L. (2023) Spatial, temporal, and social dynamics in visitation to US national parks: A big data approach. Tourism Management Perspectives, 48, 101143.
Working paper on urban design factors associated with social mixing in urban parks.
Working paper on spatial & temporal patterns of green coverage.

2. Environmental Determinants of Health

Wei, H., Renson, A., Huang, X., Thorpe, L. E., Spoer, B. R., & Charles, S. L. (2024) Assessing potential benefits of visits to neighborhoods with higher tree canopy coverage using mobility data: Associations with cardiovascular health outcomes in twenty US metropolitan areas. Health & Place, 89, 103299.
Working papers on climate change & environmental determinants of health.
Wei, H., Thorpe, L.E., Spoer, B., Azan, A., Bershteyn, A., Titus, A. One Size Fits Few: Localizing Climate Risk Indicators to Inform Adaptation and Response. (Working paper)

3. Redlining, Environment, Cardiovascular Health and Adverse Birth Outcomes

Wei, H., Spoer, B.R., Titus, A.R., Lampe, T.M., Gourevitch, M.N., Faber, J.W., Korzeniewskic, S.J., Bauer, S.J., Thorpe, L.E. (2024) Associations between 1930s HOLC Grades and Estimated Population Burden of Cardiovascular Disease Risk Factors in 2020. PNAS Nexus. <Click here for code>
Bauer, S.J., Spoer, B., Ehrman, R., Opara, I., Wei, H., Ellendula, R., Haidar, A., Hardeman, M., Levy, PD., & Korzeniewski, S.J. (Accepted) A Systematic Review of Historic Neighborhood Redlining and Contemporary Health Outcomes.
Pilot grant, 2024
NYU Langone’s Collaborative Center in Environmental Health Research and Translation. (NIEHS)
Exploring the Legacy of the Federal Housing Administration’s Housing Policies on Present-Day Disparities in Preterm Births and Low Birth Weight in Chicago, IL.
Role: Principal Investigator
External Collaborator: Chicago Department of Public Health
Amount: $17,050

4. Urban Mobility, Social Equity, and COVID-19

Huang, X., Lu, J., Gao, S., Wang, S., Liu, Z., & Wei, H. Staying at Home Is a Privilege: Evidence from Fine-Grained Mobile Phone Location Data in the United States during the COVID-19 Pandemic. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1-20.
Huang, X., Li, Z., Lu, J., Wang, S., Wei, H., & Chen, B. Time-series clustering for home dwell time during COVID-19: what can we learn from it?. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, 9(11), 675.

5. Twitter Sentiment, Race, and Crime

In collaboration with Big Data for Health Equity research group, Dr. Hswen, and so on.
Wei, H., Hswen, Y., Merchant, J., Drew, L., Nguyen, Q., Yue, X., Mane, H., Nguyen, T. (2024) From Tweets to Streets: Association between Twitter Sentiment and Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: An Observational Study. Journal of Medical Internet Research.
Nguyen, T. T., Merchant, J. S., Yue, X., Mane, H., Wei, H., Huang, D., ... & Nguyen, Q. C. (2024) A Decade of Tweets: Visualizing Racial Sentiments Towards Minoritized Groups in the United States Between 2011 and 2021. Epidemiology, 35(1), 51-59. <GeoPortal>
Mane H., Yue X., Yu W., Doig A., Wei H., Delcid N., Sun A., Antonietti A., Hassan R., Harris A., Ohanele V., & Nguyen Q. C. Mixed-Method Examination of the Public’s Reaction on Twitter to the Overturning of Roe V Wade. Healthcare.
Goffe T., Bhandari A., Phansalkar R., Camel L., Onah C., Tsui C., Khan N., Nascimento A., Taichman M., Humphrey L., Griswold D., Wei H. Dirge: Black and Indigenous Hemispheric Burial. Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present Journal.

6. Urban Redevelopment & Urban Economics

Carruthers, J., & Wei, H. (Accepted, 2024, JGS) What Drives Urban Redevelopment Activity? Evidence from Machine-Learning and Econometric Analysis in Three American Cities.
Wei, H., Wostenholme LC., & Carruthers JI. (2021) Planning and Markets at Work: Seattle Under Growth Management and Economic Pressure. Sustainability, 13(14), 7634.
Carruthers, J. I., Wei, H., & Wostenholme, L. (2022) Urban containment as smart growth. In Handbook on Smart Growth: Promise, Principles, and Prospects for Planning.

Research Methods

Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
Spatial Statistics
Causal Inference
(Working paper: A review of studies comparing results with and without adjusting for treatment-confounder feedback with Dr. Ellicott Matthay.)
Machine Learning