Liwen Zhang

I am in my last year of the PhD programme. I see myself as an enthusiastic, approachable and hard-working person who takes pride in landscape research, creative landscape design and graphic presentation. As an undergraduate, I conducted a municipal research project investigating the renewal strategy for old communities based on the preferences of older residents between April 2014 and March 2015. This project involved two universities as well as Suzhou City Council and was awarded the Suzhou Social Science Research Innovation Award. The results of this research project were compiled into the Suzhou Old Community Renewal Manual. Because of this successful research experience, I have developed an interest in, within the urban environment, tacking social and environmental issues through experiential studies and design interventions at the plant scale and human scale, which remain the key drivers in my current research.        

Since I started to study at the University of Sheffield as a postgraduate, I became increasingly eager to reawaken my academic interest in health and horticulture. At that time, I was fortunate enough to get to know my current supervisor Dr Ross Cameron and Dr Nicola Dempsey. Inspired by them, I narrowed down my research interest, and focused on creating restorative green spaces, with a strong emphasis on the relationship between plants characters and ecosystem services. Up until now, I have developed four research projects during my PhD programme. The manuscript of my first project was submitted to Urban Forestry & Urban Greening and expected to be published after minor revisions (in progress).