About me

I was born and grew up in Seoul Metropolitan Area, Republic of Korea, which was mostly covered with built environments. In other words, high-rise buildings and high-density housing. I think this is where my interest in the function of land-use types began. I chose Geography as my first major. As you might know, Geography is a multidisciplinary science. I was very interested in Geovisualisation in my undergraduate years, representing the geographical features, and illustrating the spatial patterns by digital mapping. I was obsessed with using maps to communicate and share my ideas with others.

My research career began by learning the principles of geography at Kyung Hee University, and it encouraged me to study how to deal with location matters using (quantitative) data analysis methods. I studied a Masters of Geographic Information Science and Spatial Statistics in the same university. However, space-time geography struck me when I was a PhD student in 2011, exploring the time-variant mobility patterns, framed by a set of spatial and temporal constraints in a given urban setting at a particular time. The question was raised as to how to address how individuals make decisions for their everyday life, and how this leads to shape the emergent sequential-activity travel patterns, with respect to the interaction between individuals (i.e. mobility behaviours) and environmental characteristics (i.e. neighbourhood effects).

In the TSU, I would like to focus on the geographies of the everyday mobilities of people, goods and information. To assess how spatio-temporal geographical contexts influence individual mobility, not only experimenting the dynamic measurements, but also coupling with precise insights of interpersonal variability in everyday mobilities.

In line with this idea, I will develop an overarching framework for people-based exposure measurement. To examine the spatio-temporal environmental risks (e.g. air pollutant emission) with respect to individual daily mobility patterns. It is not only estimating the population-at-risk, in terms of time-varying ambient population estimates across space, but also take both social contexts and everyday mobility practices into consideration. It also allows to identify the vulnerable social groups, and calculate spatio-temporal population-at-risk. In order to assess the influence of time-variant exposed population-at-risk upon the spatial and temporal patterning of environmental risks, I will pay attention to three empirical themes:

1. Individual mobility patterns: “reconstructing the daily paths and activity-spaces of individuals of different social groups” using combined Big and Small data

2. Estimating spatio-temporal ambient population: “where and how much time people spend while engaged in their activities” in a given urban setting at a particular time

3. People-based exposure measurement: to estimate spatio-temporal population-at-risk, incorporate with the interpersonal variability of time-varying population. To do so, it allows to examine the contexts and interaction effects between individual mobility patterns and neighbourhood effects.