Lawrence D. Frank, Ph.D., AICP, ASLA

Dr. Frank is the J. Armand Bombardier Chairholder in Sustainable Transportation at the University of British Columbia in the School of Community and Regional Planning and Institute for Resources and the Environment. He specializes in the interaction between land use, travel behavior, air quality, and health. He has co-authored two books in the past year two years on these topics: Health and Community Design, The Impacts of The Built Environment on Physical Activity and Urban Sprawl and Public Health, Both of which are published by Island Press www.islandpress.org. In June of 2004, The American Journal of Preventive Medicine published his study, Obesity Relationships with Community Design, Physical Activity, and Time Spent in Cars documenting for the first time relationships between travel habits, neighborhood design characteristics, and the odds of being obese. This study was featured in Time Magazine, on CNN, ABC news, and over 300 media outlets worldwide. In February, Dr. Frank presented the Heart and Stroke Foundation’s annual report card focusing on the built environment. At that time he also released another study that documented documenting that residents of the most walkable areas of the Atlanta region are 2.4 times more likely to get recommended levels of physical activity than residents of the most sprawling areas of that region. Dr. Frank recently completed a 5 year $4.6 million research program known as SMARTRAQ – which was the first to integrate land use, transportation, air quality, and health. He recently established the Active Transportation Collaboratory at UBC that will engage local agencies on similar issues of transportation, the environment, and health in the Vancouver region (see www.act-trans.ubc.ca).