Dr. Cheng’s Ph.D. is from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at Texas A&M University where she focused on microclimatic landscape research and design.
Her researches focuses how landscapes can become climatically responsive and sustainable to provide people, especially socially vulnerable populations, with resilient, equitable, and healthy living environments, on multiple scales. She examined this topic by weaving health, climatic, environmental, ecological, and socio-economic factors together using interdisciplinary technologies such as remote sensing, spatial statistics, energy budget modeling and simulations. Her specializations include 1) urban heat islands and heat vulnerability/risk assessment under climate change; 2) resilient communities encountering multiple hazards; 3) evidence-based microclimatic design; 4) outdoor thermal comfort for heat vulnerable groups especially children; and 5) low-cost meteorological instrumentation.