Dr. Cheuk Fan Ng

Biography

I joined Athabasca University in 1993. Before coming to AU, I had held faculty and research positions at University of Saskatchewan, University of New Brunswick, and St. Thomas University in Canada. Born and raised in Hong Kong, I came to Canada with great enthusiasm to pursue my undergraduate studies in the frigid, peaceful, and sparsely populated Manitoba. This new life experience and my work experience in real estate appraisal sparked my interests in environmental psychology, the study of interactions between individuals and their physical environment. I continued on with my graduate work at the University of Victoria, B.C., where I received my masters and doctoral degrees in psychology with a focus in environmental psychology.

Research Interest

As I move on in my career, my teaching interests have cut across several applied, non-clinical areas of psychology. My research interests remain in the environmental, social, and cross-cultural psychology areas: noise, crowding, and privacy in the work and home environments, immigrants' use of space and acculturation, and more recently, retail environments and telework. As Athabasca University students are studying at anytime from anywhere, so are most of the the professors and tutors working at different times from a number of locations. It just seems critically important that we understand the ramifications of this new work trend. I recently joined the editorial board of the Journal of Environmental Psychology. I have been a member of the Environmental Psychology Section of the Canadian Psychological Association for many years and served as its Section Chair (1997-2002) and newsletter editor (1992-1995; 1998-2002). I am also a member of the Environmental Design Research Association, the International Association of People-Environment Studies and the American Psychological Association, Division 34. I was an affiliated researcher with the Prairie Metropolis Centre: A Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration, Integration, and Diversity, based in the University of Alberta (2000-2013 when it was de-established).