Peter James

Trained in environmental health and epidemiology, Peter has focused his research on estimating the influence of spatial factors, including exposure to nature, the built environment, the food environment, air pollution, light pollution, noise, and socioeconomic factors, on health behaviors, mental health, and chronic disease. He has over a decade of experience working with large prospective cohort studies, including the Nurses’ Health Studies, the Framingham Heart Study, and the Southern Community Cohort Study, where he has aided in the creation of many spatial exposure metrics and linked them to health data. He is developing methodologies to assess real-time, high spatio-temporal resolution objective measures of location and behavior by linking smartphone-based global positioning systems (GPS) and wearable device accelerometry data to understand how spatial factors influence health behaviors. Most recently, he is creating novel metrics of spatial factors by applying Deep Learning algorithms to Google Street View imagery.