FHS professor recognized with CIHR Trailblazer award for her work in creating healthier communities

By Geron Malbas

Health sciences professor Meghan Winters used to be a hardcore cyclist riding alongside busy highways in her quest to get from A to B. But after having children, she realized there were few places to cycle when safety became the priority. That revelation changed the focus of some of the research in her Cities, Health, and Active Transportation Research (CHATR) lab. She began studying active transportation options for people of all ages and abilities.

Today, her work on active transportation has shaped the streets of Canadian cities, contributing to a 2020 Trailblazer Award in Population and Public Health Research from the national CIHR Institute of Population and Public Health. The award recognizes her innovative contributions, leadership and mentorship in the field of population health.

Over the last decade, Winters has built strategic, long-term partnerships with stakeholders from diverse sectors, including health, transportation, and social planning. She has worked with municipalities across Canada to promote safe and healthy community design, influencing policies to improve infrastructure for active transportation.

In the CHATR lab her team researches how community design impacts the ways people move around and connect with each other. The team also examines the equity implications of policy and environmental changes in communities.

A large part of Winters’ research focuses on active transportation and its role in shaping healthier, more inclusive communities. During her seven-year, public, bike-share research program in Vancouver, she found equity was a significant topic.

“While micro-mobility programs are often criticized on an equity front, as members are more likely to be young men, in fact, when we looked at usage we found that 10 per cent of the members made 50 per cent of the trips. Importantly, super-users were, in fact, the lower income members,” she says. “This suggests the program is supporting those with greater transportation needs and that equity-oriented policy efforts may be effective.”

Winters is always looking for promising new data sources, including citizen-science approaches. In 2016, she launched the INTErventions, Research and Action in Cities Team (INTERACT), which evaluates the impacts of physical activity, social participation, and well-being on changes to Canadian cities. Currently, she is working with data from the fitness app Strava. The app, which has more than 42 million users, details information on where and when people cycle. She says it may be the first time a safety study has tapped into this data.

“My hope is our team’s work on big data can establish a new approach to cycling surveillance,” she says. “The bigger goal within this work is to generate data and tools that are user-ready, so that cities have capacity to tap into big data for bicycling.”

In 2011, Winters received the Knowledge Translation Award from the National Collaborating Centre for Public Health for her doctoral work creating a cycling route planner for the City of Vancouver. Ultimately, it formed the foundation for expanded “bike mapping” in the Lower Mainland and was developed into Bike Score, a partnership with U.S.-based company Walk Score. The company measures how ‘bikeable’ an area is, based on infrastructure, topography and amenities. Her other big data bicycling projects include OpenStreetMaps for infrastructure and BikeMaps.org for crowdsourced safety data.

Winters now leads the Child Active Transportation Safety and the Environment (CHASE) study, which focuses on school travel and safety.

In addition to her research strengths, Winters excels at teaching and mentoring. She is committed to training graduate students, ensuring they have the interdisciplinary skills for undertaking population-health intervention research. She has taught undergraduate courses with CityStudio, and the Surrey CityLab, creating opportunities for students to tackle the real-word issues facing city builders. In 2017 she won the FHS Graduate Teaching/Mentorship Excellence Award and, in 2015, the Undergraduate Teaching Excellence Award.

Winters is also very involved in the SFU community. Earlier this year, she received the SFU President’s Award for Leadership in Sustainability. Last year, she was appointed to SFU’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative Advisory Board.

Winters’ big goal is to translate her research into real-world solutions by examining how cities and their infrastructures can play a role in promoting healthy and safe transportation for people of all ages and abilities.

“In my opinion,” she says, “trailblazing in population health is about truly responsive knowledge exchange.”