KHPeople: Dr Yijing Li

The Deputy Director of the Centre for Urban Science and Progress (London) explains the importance of data to inform strategy, and the benefits of working within KHP.

What is your role at CUSP, and what does CUSP do?

I’m the Deputy Director (Skills & Knowledge) for CUSP London, and academic lead for the MSc Urban Informatics programme at the Department of Informatics. CUSP London is the abbreviation for Centre for Urban Science and Progress (London), which is a research centre at the Department of Informatics, NMES Faculty, King's College London. Our aim is to support interdisciplinary research and innovation using data science in and for London.

What inspired you to get into this work?

As an educator in urban informatics with a geospatial background, I have long been obsessed with research projects in HSE fields (health, safety and environment) on urban big data mining, exploration, analysis, and visualisation, especially telling data-driven stories as evidence for the public and policy makers.

This work provides rich content and opportunities for sharing my knowledge and skills on data collection, processing and mapping to future data scientists, enabling me to collaborate with talented researchers from multi-disciplinary themes, and generating impactful outcomes with external partners from the public sector and industry.

Please briefly introduce us to your new collaboration with KHP?

To maintain the partnerships at CUSP London, Informatics, we have organised activities since 2018 such as providing MSc Urban Informatics students with data-driven collaborative projects proposed by partners.

The collaboration with KHP enables me, as the lead for the placement module, to provide students with opportunities to gain vital experience at King’s College Hospital NHS FT through analysing real health-data, applying cutting-edge modelling and visualisation skills, associating it with other socio-economic and demographic statistics, observing data-driven strategy formulation and implementation, and most importantly, contributing to localised strategic policies with outcomes as evidence.

What do you see as the benefits of working in partnership?

Such a collaborative partnership model is crucial to a benign research-education-practice ecosystem. It helps to establish the platform and sustainable workflow in facilitating stakeholders' networking; supporting our research and education through research projects and students' practical projects; and showcasing the knowledge impacts to wider audiences through various events and opportunities.