Language Sciences member, Xing (Ezra) Yu, is a Masters' Student in the School of Population and Public Health at UBC.
What are your current research interests?
I have always been interested in public health issues caused by urbanization and how they can be studied using advanced health research methodologies. My current project examines the effects of residential noise on children’s language development, as well as the corresponding remediation effects of urban greenspace. The project has employed a quantitative approach to investigate the impacts of noise and greenness on a cohort of 34,000 Vancouver children who participated in an early developmental assessment project coordinated by the UBC Human Early Learning Partnership. Noise exposure at children’s homes was estimated from a Vancouver noise map produced at UBC. Associations between noise and language development were examined using regression modelling, while accounting for socioeconomic and other characteristics using health administrative data linked through Pop Data BC.
What inspires you to pursue your line of research?
Within my academic background, the key themes which have piqued my interest were the understanding of linguistics and epidemiology, and both continue to do so to this day. The academic journey brought my attention to the environmental impacts on human life, but from different perspectives. In linguistics, the environment indicates the relationship between individuals in their context within society, while in epidemiology, the environment indicates physical properties in the external environment, such as air pollutants. This chasm exists perhaps due to few people having expertise in both fields, but I have been fortunate enough to realize this gap. Thus, my research pursuit is now acting as a mediator to explore the effects of environments from an epidemiological perspective on linguistic intelligence. As the environmental problem gets more intricate within urbanization, I hope my research is in a position to attain adaptive potential to usher in the next stage for public health.
In an ideal world, what is a unique project, or field of study, that you would be interested in being involved with in the future?
My unique project in an ideal world will be devising a smart city - an optimal condition that is built inside real-time monitoring on environmental attributes or may even be calibrated by brain-machine interface technology.
How do you like to spend your spare time?
I like reading, writing, volunteering, and learning online courses during my spare time.
When you were younger, what did you want to do when you "grew up" and why?
I've wished to be a novelist since I was a teenager. I adore designing fiction stories - it can bleed through my writing, which I'd chalk up to pondering or dreaming. I may ridicule illusion and term it aesthetic expression by situating myself in an impossible realm. Still, I appreciate fantasy by immersing in musing or dreams that went off without a hitch.