HD4 Summer Seminar Series
Date/Time
Date(s) - August 25, 2025
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Date/Time
Date(s) - August 25, 2025
11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Location
CREATE Tower
Categories No Categories
CARES will be hosting an exciting line-up of seminars, linked to our Health-driven design for cities (HD4) research programme, running from late July to end August.
The HD4 Summer Seminar Series will feature Cambridge academics, who are actively involved in the programme, sharing their latest insights on the link between public health, urban design and more.
Please find the details of the sessions below.
Seminar Information
Seminar 1 Topic: From traditional epidemiology to precision public health
Speaker: Dr Søren Brage
Date: 22 July 2025
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: CREATE Seminar Room L2, CREATE Tower
Dr Brage’s abstract: Epidemiological studies with prospective design and long follow-up have established strong inverse associations between physical activity and fitness exposures and a range of disease endpoints, whilst surveillance studies document the distribution of risk factors and disease over time to allow evaluation of public policies in terms of their impact on population health potential. The recent proliferation of smartphone and wearables in the general population, coupled with advances in remote assessment methodology, heralds a new era for public health through enhanced translation of research findings directly into the hands of the general consumer and aligning with the aspirations of precision medicine.
Seminar 2 Topic: Prediction and prevention of Type 2 diabetes
Speaker: Professor Nick Wareham
Date: 1 August 2025
Time: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM
Location: CREATE Theatrette Room L2, CREATE Tower
Professor Wareham’s abstract: In 2024, there were an estimated 589 million adults in the world living with diabetes, but this figure is set to rise to 853 million by 2050. A further half a billion people have prediabetes and are at high risk of developing the condition. This talk will present an update on progress on individual and societal level prevention efforts, as an exemplar of strategies for NCD prevention in general, and the opportunity of projects like HD4 to bring approaches together.
Seminar 3 Topic: Impacts of planning policy targeting food retail in England
Speaker: Dr. Thomas Burgoine
Date: 15 August 2025
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: CREATE Seminar Room L2, CREATE Tower
Dr Burgoine’s abstract: Healthy neighbourhoods help people make healthy choices. Having access to more fast-food outlets can encourage consumption of the unhealthy foods they sell. Designating zones around schools where new fast-food outlets are not allowed to open is an increasingly popular planning policy in England. In this talk, Dr Thomas Burgoine will present the findings from his evaluation of the retail, health and economic impacts of this policy, and its public acceptability. He will describe the real-world impacts of this research and suggest what these findings might mean for planning policy and practice in Singapore.
Seminar 4 Topic: Complex urbanism – unpicking the relationship between urban environments and health-related behaviours
Speaker: Dr. Louise Foley
Date: 21 August 2025
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: CREATE Theatrette Room L2, CREATE Tower
Dr Foley’s abstract: Cities are not just collections of buildings and infrastructure. They are dynamic, evolving entities shaped by and for people. Understanding the links between urban environments and the health-related behaviours of residents is crucial for addressing the challenges and opportunities of rapid urbanisation and creating more sustainable, healthy and equitable cities. In this talk, Dr Louise Foley will discuss how urban environments (both physical and social) can shape population-level physical activity and dietary behaviour, drawing on previous research in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. She will highlight the opportunity of projects like HD4 to contribute to methodological and conceptual advances in this field.
Seminar 5 Topics: Built environment decisions in advancing precision prevention, and calculating individualised environmental exposure measurements in HD4
Speakers: Professor Ronita Bardhan and Dr Jethro Akroyd
Date: 25 August 2025
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM
Location: CREATE Seminar Room L2, CREATE Tower
Professor Bardhan’s abstract: Built environment decisions play a critical role in shaping health outcomes, and resilience in warming climate. While traditional approaches have treated urban design and health as parallel domains, emerging evidence demonstrates that precision prevention, a framework widely applied in medicine and public health, can be translated into the design of sustainable environments. This talk will outline how architectural and urban decisions can be informed by data-driven insights to prevent adverse health impacts before they occur. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across the world, that integrates environmental data, epidemiological evidence and design analytics, the talk will discuss pathways for embedding precision prevention into policy and practice. By reframing the built environment as a site of anticipatory health action, the talk highlights its potential to deliver scalable, equitable and culturally contextualized solutions that mitigate climate risks while advancing public health.
Dr Akroyd’s abstract: Singapore’s current public health approach focuses on improving population health by encouraging small, positive changes across many people. However, the evidence base underlying this is weak. HD4 aims to strengthen the evidence base in Singapore by identifying and addressing key risk factors to understand and influence upstream determinants of health. To do so, HD4 will work synergistically with SG100K and add data characterising the individual environmental exposures of cohort participants. Dr Akroyd will present several ways past CARES projects such as The World Avatar have used ontologies to link physical and digital components to create a dynamic, evolving system of data. By utilising a similar approach, the seminar highlights how HD4 will be able to characterise different aspects of Singapore’s environment and determine individualised, dynamic exposures to them.