With an MSc, Kerstin Kopal is a research assistant and PhD student at the University of Duisburg-Essen at the Institute of Mobility and Urban Planning. She began her studies in Spatial Planning at RPTU Kaiserslautern-Landau (Germany) with a bachelor's degree in 2016, followed by a master's degree in Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University (Germany), which she completed in 2019. During her studies, Kerstin Kopal worked both in an urban planning office and at the universities where she was enrolled. As a result, she recognized the synergies of urban planning with science at an early stage. Therefore, she started working as a research assistant at the Institute of Mobility and Urban Planning, where she is currently researching the influences of the built environment on health and mobility behavior and writing her PhD thesis.