Audrey de Nazelle wins GEAB Recognition Award
| February 13, 2006 | |
| Audrey de Nazelle (PhD, Crawford-Brown Advisor) has received an honorable mention award, titled The GEAB Recognition Award, in the Graduate Education Advancement Board (GEAB) Impact Award competition. This award, sponsored by The Graduate School’s external advancement board of private citizens, recognizes outstanding graduate student research of particular benefit to North Carolina. Audrey will be recognized during the Graduate School’s Annual Student Recognition Celebration on Thursday, April 6, 2006, in the Carolina Club of the George Watts Hill Alumni Center where she will receive a recognition certificate and a cash award of $500. Her abstract is provided below:Health Risk Assessment of a Pedestrian-Oriented Environment
Creating more pedestrian-friendly environments is seen as a “common cause” solution for a multitude of health and environmental problems the US has not been entirely successful at addressing. Concerns over an obesity epidemic have been particularly influential in the movement towards such built environment policies, given the poor physical activity habits held by three fourths of US adults. Some unintended consequences may emerge from such community designs however; for example walking and cycling along busy roads may increase exposure to air pollutants and traffic hazards. Yet, the net health effect that results from changes in the built environment is not known today, and urban and environmental policies are generally not concerned with such assessments. Before undergoing widespread neighborhood transformations, it is timely to examine the effects of such community design changes, including their unintended consequences. This dissertation proposes a methodology to assess built environment changes, focusing on the competing health risks associated with the creation of more walkable environments. The purpose is not to discourage such initiatives, but rather to call for a comprehensive approach to assessing such policies and providing decision-makers with better analysis tools. This research examines the theoretical and empirical evidence of health trade-offs associated with pedestrian-friendly designs and proposes a risk assessment approach to analyze net health effects of such neighborhood transformations. A computational model is developed to quantitatively measure competing risks, specifically health tradeoffs between increased physical activity and changes in exposures to air pollution and traffic hazards, in areas where such policies are hypothesized. The analysis underscores the importance of achieving greater integration of health concerns in planning decision-making processes. It concludes with policy recommendations for more health-promoting built environments and a research agenda for improving our ability to assess health impacts of neighborhood transformations. For further information please contact Rebecca Riggsbee Lloyd by email at Rebecca_Lloyd@unc.edu |
