Åsa Persson is a PhD student in Environmental Epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
Åsa is analysing secondary data sets alongside blue health researchers, to investigate how the health and wellbeing of different European populations is affected by how close they live to environments such as coasts, rivers and lakes.
Åsa studied human geography and urban and regional planning at Umeå University and public health epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute, before spending four years working as an urban planning consultant. Her PhD is focused on the association between urban residential greenness and different health outcomes: cardiovascular and metabolic health outcomes, physical activity, and general and mental health. Åsa has a special interest in GIS (Geographic Information System), geographical and environmental dimensions of health, and how spatial thinking and information systems can be used in all sorts of health-related analyses.
Photographer credit: Sarah Wiklund
