Join us for the latest Department of Geography and Planning Seminar Series: Ecosystem Resilience and Circular Health, with Dr. Bing Xu.
- Date: Friday, May 22, 2026
- Time: 8:00-9:30am
- Location:
This event is open to all students, faculty, staff, and members of the public.
Abstract
This talk introduces the concept of circular health, the feedback loop in which climate change degrades ecosystems, degraded ecosystems generate health risks, and the resulting health burden erodes communities’ capacity for environmental stewardship. Drawing on two decades of work at the intersection of remote sensing, disease ecology, and public health, Professor Xu shows how she has built the observational and modelling tools needed to study these loops as an integrated system. She demonstrates this through three lines of evidence: global ecosystem monitoring at scale, 10-metre wetland mapping, wildland-urban interface fire risk, and urban vegetation cooling under extreme heat; climate-driven disease transmission models that have revealed how environmental change shapes outbreaks of avian influenza, hantavirus, dengue, and COVID-19; and analyses of how infrastructure inequality amplifies these risks for vulnerable populations. She closes by discussing how these global-scale tools can support place-based research where climate, ecosystems, and health converge, turning circular health from concept into practice.
Biography
Bing Xu is Professor in the Department of Earth System Science and Academic Lead of the Ecology Discipline at Tsinghua University. She is a Fellow of the International Society for Digital Earth and directs the Ministry of Education's Field Station for East Asian Migratory Birds and Habitat Ecology. She holds an MS and PhD in Environmental Science from UC Berkeley and previously held faculty positions at Texas State University and the University of Utah. Her research integrates high-resolution remote sensing, spatial analysis, and bioinformatics to monitor environmental change and its impacts on human health, developing models of infectious disease transmission that link environmental change, pathogen evolution, and disease dynamics across scales.
She has published over 200 refereed SCI journal articles in venues including PNAS and The Lancet, with 30,000+ Google Scholar citations and an H-index of 83. Her awards include the Elsevier Atlas Award, AAG Early Career Award, University of Utah Superior Research Award, and recognition for her contributions to combating COVID-19 at Tsinghua University. She has served as President of Chinese Professionals in Geographic Information Science (CPGIS), Chief Scientist of China's National Fundamental Research Program, and on the editorial boards of Scientific Data, ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, and Annals of GIS, among others.