Mengya Xu, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Population and Public Health Sciences at the Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California. She received her Ph.D. in Population, Health and Place from USC and her M.S. and B.S. in Geographic Information Science from Wuhan University, China. Her research integrates GIScience, spatial epidemiology, human mobility, environmental exposure assessment, and urban analytics to examine how built, social, and environmental contexts shape health inequalities, with a focus on food access, transportation equity, chronic disease, cognitive aging, and dementia. Her work has been published in journals including Applied Geography, Cities, Health & Place, Journal of Transport Geography, Habitat International, and Food Security. She is a member of professional societies including AAG, IAPHS, SER, ISTAART, ISUH, and Women in GIS. Her recent recognitions include the 2026 Women in GIS & Esri Seed Grant for Practitioners and Academics in GIS/Geospatial Fields and the Columbia SHARP Professional Development Scholarship Grant.