Ph.D. student Youngjae Won awarded a Lattie and Elva Coor Building Great Communities Fellowship.
Youngjae Won, a 3rd year doctoral student at ASU’s School of Public Affair has been awarded a Lattie and Elva Coor Building Great Communities fellowship for the 2021-22 academic year for his research on Phoenix residents’ greenspace usage during COVID-19.
Using a large-scale dataset collected from anonymized mobile phone GPS pings, Youngjae's study looked at how COVID-19 policies influenced Phoenix residents' park visits. He discovered that Phoenix residents' park visits dropped by 50.2 percent immediately after the emergency declaration compared to changes in 2019. Although high-income communities’ reduction was not significantly different from that in low-income communities, they recovered about three times faster than low-income communities after the stay-at-home order was lifted. With Lattie and Elva Coor Building Great Communities fellowship, he is expanding his research for equitable access to parks across the United States.
Lattie Coor, the former president of ASU, and his wife Elva founded the Coor Fellowship in 1999. The fellowship was inspired by a series of roundtable discussions about ASU's Morrison Institute for Public Policy's report "What Matters in Metropolitan Phoenix." The fellowship's goal is to support students apply their intellectual assets to immediate and pressing issues in Arizona's communities.