Professional summary
Hongyan is a Spatial Data Scientist at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH), based at the Lancaster site. She has a BSc in Natural Resources Management from Nanjing University, a MSc in Environmental Hydrology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and a PhD in Quantitative Geography from the University of Vienna.
Before pursuing her PhD, Hongyan worked for several years in the Computer Department at Peking University. Following her doctorate, she held research positions at several UK universities, contributing to multiple EU- and UK-funded projects. Her work has focused on the development of GIS-based decision support tools and the analysis of spatio-temporal environmental and health data. For example, she developed a GIS-based multi-criteria analysis tool for river catchment management and conducted studies on hand, foot and mouth disease and land use change, investigating their underlying drivers using methods such as Bayesian hierarchical modelling and convolutional neural networks.
More recently, she has been involved in environmental pollution studies through projects LTLS-FE, Intentionally Added Microplastics, and ETERNAL, all based at Lancaster. Her focus is on chemical pollution emissions. She has completed estimations of contaminants released historically into wastewater treatment plants (WwTPs) and freshwater systems, including metals (Cd, Cu, Ni, Pb, and Zn) and organic chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, personal care products, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and industrial compounds. She has also modelled future emissions of these substances under UK Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (UK-SSPs), all at a 5km spatial resolution. Additionally, she has contributed to the quantification of microplastics emissions in the UK and modelled the emissions of high-risk, currently used human pharmaceuticals to surface waters and soils across Europe.