Dr. Li YI has a training background in public health, spatial science, and urban planning. His current work intersects the fields of environmental epidemiology, health behavioral research, and bioinformatics, and focuses on integrating smartphones and wearable devices, Big Data analytics, and geographic information systems (GIS) to understand the impact of neighborhood built environment and greenspace on health behaviors, mental health, and chronic disease outcomes.

As a Thomas O. Pyle research fellow at Department of Population Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and an affiliate of The Spatial and Contextual Exposomics and Epidemiology Laboratory (SPACEE Lab) at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Channing Division of Network Medicine of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Dr. Yi collaborates with Drs. Peter James, Jaime Hart, and Jorge Chavarro on analyses utilizing the rich smartphone data being collected in the prospective cohorts at Harvard, including Nurses’ Health Studies, Growing Up Today Study, and Project Viva.

Prior to joining Harvard, Dr. Yi completed his interdisciplinary Ph.D. degree in Population, Health and Place at Spatial Sciences Institute, the University of Southern California. Before that, he taught as a full-time lecturer at the University of Miami School of Architecture and Department of Geography and Sustainable Development between 2013-16. Meanwhile, he provided GIS consulting services to several urban design and planning firms in Miami, FL.