Lawrence Frank

Dr. Frank is the president of Urban Design 4 Health, Inc., and a Professor at the University of California San Diego. He also serves as an Honorary Healthy Cities Professor at Hong Kong University and as an Affiliate Professor at the University of British Columbia. He specializes in the interactions between land use, travel behavior, air quality and their impacts on health and climate change. He has done fundamental, groundbreaking research on the effects of neighborhood walkability on travel patterns and sustainability for 25 years and has led over $20 million in funded research and published over 100 peer-reviewed articles and reports on these topics for a diverse range of journals such as Transportation, Journal of the American Planning Association, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Social Science and Medicine. He is a “walkability pioneer” and was among the very first to quantify connections between built environment, active transportation, and health. He coined the term “walkability” in the early ’90s and his work led to Walk Score and has been cited over 44,000 times. He has been listed in Thompson and Reuter’s top 1% in the social sciences and was recently ranked the #1 top planning academic in North America according to Google Scholar. Dr. Frank works directly with local, regional, provincial or state, and federal agencies to help translate results from research into evidence-based tools that provide direct feedback on the health and environmental impacts of alternative transportation and land development proposals.