Meghan Winters named as a 2021 Distinguished SFU Professor

By Sharon Mah

SFU recently named Faculty of Health Science (FHS) associate professor Meghan Winters as a 2021 Distinguished SFU Professor.

This recognition – a joint initiative of SFU’s Vice-President, Academic and Provost and the Vice-President, Research and International – is offered annually to eight exceptional university faculty researchers and provides an opportunity for these academics to both engage the public about their areas of research, and to provide student and faculty mentorship.

Winters – whose research in healthy cities sits at the nexus of health, transportation, and urban planning – notes that “studying real world changes carries a lot of risk. It involves relationship building in order to understand when and how changes are happening in cities, and then to design and fund research to wrap around this. I appreciate that SFU recognizes and values that kind of community-engaged work.”

The Distinguished Professor accolade comes with a requirement that recipients share their work through events such as lectures, panels, and presentations. Winters is excited that the program will support time, space and funding to engage wider audiences in her research. “This will allow me to bring in more students from health sciences, urban studies, geography from across the university. [My research] takes that kind of skill set: we need social scientists, population health scientists, computer scientists and engineers as well – [it engages] across the whole spectrum of the university.”

Winters leads the Cities, Health and Active Transportation Research (CHATR) lab, and is particularly excited about two upcoming projects. She is a co-investigator in the “Mobilizing Justice” project led by University of Toronto associate professor Steven Farber, which seeks to better understand transport poverty in Canada and to understand the actions that can be taken to reduce the challenges of people experiencing transport poverty. For this project – funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for $2.5M over five years – Winters and Nancy Smith Lea of The Centre for Active Transportation – will be co-leading the transportation modes theme. “We're looking at the challenges people face in terms of transport poverty: what adaptations do people have to figure out to get around? In many households there may be no car – or one car which is used primarily for one adult to travel to work. In this situation, some families find all sorts of ways to make the other household trips: be it transit, car pools, cargo bikes, bike shares, linking trips, or even perhaps delivery options. We’re interested in understanding these behaviours – and through this learning how travel can be done differently with less dependance on cars, for people across income levels.” She notes that the BC government recently announced free transit for children 12 and under – an initiative she describes as “a start towards supporting families in making sustainable transportation choices.”

Winters is also looking forward to continuing her work with the INTErventions, Research, and Action in Cities Team (INTERACT), which just received $918,000 from CIHR  to continue their work looking at the impacts of built environment interventions on physical activity, social connectedness, and well-being in four cities across Canada. “We’ll be able to dig into some of the equity questions that have been really important to our city partners. It's also a good opportunity to look at how things have changed because of COVID-19, both in terms of changes cities are making but also in terms of people's perspectives about the importance of social connectedness, being physically active outside, and the massive disruption to travel behaviors. Because we've been doing the study for five years already and now have another five years of funding ahead of us, we can really leverage the power of longitudinal data.”

When asked what it means to her to be offered the Distinguished SFU Professor opportunity during a global pandemic, Winters noted that COVID-19 has advanced some aspects of her work: the value of and necessity for social connectedness and health equity is now front of mind for multiple stakeholders, not just public health researchers. Similarly, her continued advocacy for wider multi-use paths is also better understood in a world where a comfortable distance between people walking and bicycling is essential not only for comfort and safety but also to facilitate prevention of infectious disease spread.

“One learning from the pandemic that I often highlight is that cities can indeed be nimble – in terms of reallocating street space and changing permitting systems for patios to save the businesses, they moved faster than we ever could have imagined.” Reflecting on the impact of the recent ‘heat dome’ weather event on the health of Lower Mainland residents, Winters reflects that the nimbleness of cities will be needed more now than ever. “Where we plant trees, develop green spaces and create cooling zones is a huge consideration for the future  this isn’t  going away. Even as we relax back into some kind of new normal of transportation patterns, we're still very much facing a climate emergency. We need fast action right now.” She and the SFU community will be leading that charge over the next year and well into the future.