Professor Xiaoqi Feng

Professor Xiaoqi Feng the Professor of Urban Health and Environment at the UNSW School of Population Health. She is also an Honorary Professorial Fellow at The George Institute for Global Health, Australia.  She has authored >200 publications with a career Field-Weighted Citation Impact (FWCI) over 9, has led major research projects (funding >$21M, including NHMRC and Heart Foundation fellowships), and successfully translated her research into policy and practice.

Professor Feng leads a research program focussed on improving urban health and reducing health inequalities. This is done by evidencing place-based interventions through conducting longitudinal studies of big data (e.g., health benefits of urban greening) and in randomised trials of social prescribing programs and related initiatives (e.g., nature prescribing). These projects are conducted mostly through the Population Wellbeing and Environment Research Lab (PowerLab), a multi-university network which she co-founded in 2016 and co-directs, and the Rapid Urbanisation and Population Health (RUPH) research group based at UNSW.

Professor Feng’s research has made significant impacts across international scholarship and the on-the-ground experiences of local communities. She co-created the widely cited 'Domains of Pathways' conceptual model in 2016 that provided a unified theory linking green space and health. She introduced the concept of "Lonelygenic Environments", a term now used internationally, in The Lancet Planetary Health in 2022. Her longitudinal studies on greening and mental, physical, and social health (e.g., loneliness) have generated many highly cited landmark papers that have informed policymaking, including the planting of 1 million trees in Sydney by 2022 by the NSW Government.

Professor Feng’s research has been recognized through commissioned publications for The Conversation [over 100,000 views across five articles], the World Economic Forum, Croakey and Landscape Architecture Australia. It has been featured in stories by mainstream Australian media including the ABC, SBS, The Canberra Times, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, C10 ‘The Project’, and Channel 7 ‘Weekender’, as well as many international news organizations including CGTN, Pacific Standard, International Business Times, 1News New Zealand, and The Guardian. Her research has also been recognised with national awards from peak Australian organizations in research (eg Cardiovascular Society for Australia and New Zealand 2024; Council for Academic Public Health Institutions in Australia 2014) and industry (eg Parks and Leisure Australia 2019).

Professor Feng has mentored 10 ECR staff members at UNSW and supervised 11 PhD students to completion so far. She is the Chair of the 30+ member UNSW Faculty of Medicine and Health Equity Diversity and Inclusion Committee (MHEDIC). She is Co-Chair of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology Capacity Building and Education Committee (ISEE CAPE). She is a steering committee member of UNSW Faculty of Medicine Cardiac, Vascular and Metabolic Medicine Theme and was an elected member of the UNSW Academic Board from July 2021 to Dec 2023.