Profile
Dr Wenjing (Wendee) Zhang is an Honorary Research Fellow at the ECI's Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Planning at the University of Waikato. Her research focuses on the relationships between nature, human health and wellbeing, urban planning, and environmental sustainability. She uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, with particular expertise in geospatial analysis, to investigate how urban environments and access to green and blue spaces influence health and wellbeing.
A key focus of Wendee’s research is understanding how urban green and blue spaces affect mental health and wellbeing, and how these benefits are distributed across different populations and places. She is particularly interested in environmental and health inequalities, including how differences in the accessibility, quality, and use of natural environments may contribute to unequal health outcomes. More broadly, her research examines how urban planning and environmental policy can support healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable cities.
Before joining the University of Waikato, Wendee was a Postdoctoral Researcher in Nature, Human Health and Wellbeing at the ECI at the University of Oxford, where she worked with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and the Flourishing and Wellbeing Theme of the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre. Her research examined the health and wellbeing impacts of urban green and blue spaces, with a particular focus on mental health, environmental exposure, and inequalities in access to nature.
Wendee completed her PhD in Geography at the University of Melbourne in 2022. Her doctoral research explored sustainability transitions in urban planning, focusing on environmental policy and urban water management and examining the role of hydraulic missions in transitions towards water sustainability.
Across her research, Wendee has worked on topics including urban green and blue spaces, environmental health, mental health and wellbeing, urban water management, sustainability transitions, environmental policy, and carbon emissions associated with urban land-cover change. Her current research brings these interests together to understand how evidence on environment and health can inform urban planning and policy and contribute to healthier, more sustainable, and more equitable communities in United Kingdom, China, Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally.