Sabrina Li
DPhil Geography and the Environment 2018
Assistant Professor in Quantitative Geography
When Sabrina was seven, her family immigrated from the ancient Chinese capital of Xi’an to the multicultural Canadian city of Toronto. Being exposed to different climates, environments, and cultures from an early age would go on to shape her interests and pursuits.
While studying Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Sabrina worked on a project to reduce arsenic poisoning from drinking water in Bangladesh. She learned that, while technology can provide safe water, improving public health and mitigating disease risk required an understanding of the various social, cultural, and other factors driving human behaviour. This led Sabrina to pursue a Master’s in health geography, and, later, intrigued by epidemiological methods, she moved to Montreal to work at the Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill.
Coming to Oxford, Sabrina was able to combine her interest in the environment, public health, and spatial epidemiology to explore human-environmental interactions on infectious disease risk in Brazil. In March 2020 when COVID-19 arrived in Brazil, Sabrina led an investigation into geographical inequalities in the virus’s epidemiological characteristics and the important role racial and social inequalities played in shaping its impact. The work was published in Nature Human Behaviour and BMJ Global Health, and was included in the UNDP-founded International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG) Reports.
Despite doing most of her DPhil in the H B Allen Centre studio flat during lockdown, Sabrina has many fond memories of Keble. “Whether it was formal dinners with friends, picnics and walks at Uni parks, or long afternoons writing in the library, I could not have imagined a better DPhil experience. Oxford and Keble gave me opportunities to make mistakes, grow, and build resilience.”
Shortly before completing her DPhil, Sabrina became Assistant Professor in Quantitative Geography at the University of Nottingham. She has been recognised on the 2022 Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list for Science and Technology.