Wen, Tzai-hung

Biography

Dr. Tzai-Hung Wen received his PhD degree from National Taiwan University in 2006. He currently is an Assistant Professor at Department of Geography, National Taiwan University. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Geographic Information Science, Academia Sinica (2007), and Project-appointed Assistant Professor of Institute of Epidemiology, National Taiwan University (2008-2009). His research interests focus on modeling and analyzing the geographical process in human environments, especially the phenomena of geospatial diffusion of discrete features (e.g. diseases and crime events) and continuous features (e.g. air quality) in urban settings. Currently and in the near future, he is developing three main research tracks. The first, from a retrospective perspective, he collaborates with public health professionals and environmental scientists to develop quantitative methods and implement micro-level monitoring systems for measuring fine-scale spatial-temporal diffusion patterns. The second track is from a prospective perspective. He collaborates on interdisciplinary studies with computer scientists to simulate spatial-temporal dynamics of collective human behaviors to assess potential impacts of intervention policies. The last, he collaborates with criminologists to develop quantitative methods to analyze the journey-to-crime trips for identifying possible areas of an anchor point of a new criminal. The methodology could be beneficial for further applying to track the source of diffusion. His major articles are published in Annals of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Simulation: Transactions of The Society for Modeling and Simulation International, International Journal of Infectious Diseases, Health & Place, Applied Geography, Geospatial Health, and Social Science & Medicine.

Research Interest

medical geography and spatial epidemiology, spatiotemporal modeling of geographical diffusion, collective spatial behavior