Congxuan Lei completed her bachelor's degree in management in China where she majored in land resource management. In her undergraduate work, she worked with skilled GIS analysts to identify potential flood hazard zones in Shahe, China by modeling local flood risk indexes. The results helped local government allocate and establish precipitation-monitoring stations effectively. Inspired by this project, she became interested in utilizing GIS to create effective policies that address social issues in the real-word and applied to the M.S. in Spatial Economics and Data Analysis of USC. In her first semester, Congxuan Lei assessed the correlation between socioeconomic disparities and breast cancer incidence and identified vulnerable populations and areas in Los Angeles County. In addition to health outcomes, she is also interested in the impact of natural disasters on regional economic development and has built a spatial database to identify fire hazard sensitivity zones to track the impact of wildfire on the house price in Los Angeles County. In the future, Congxuan plans to work in the field of spatial analysis and concentrate on exploring how to use geographical information to improve the rationality of the urban planning and equity of public resources arrangement.
