Prof Nick Wareham presented Health-Driven Design for Cities (HD4) to guests at the recent “Future of CARES” seminar where we outlined the new projects for CARES in 2025.
December sees the launch of Health-Driven Design for Cities (HD4), a groundbreaking Singapore-based research collaboration seeking to discover how best to design urban environments that enhance resident’s health. HD4 is a partnership between Nanyang Technological University (NTU), the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the University of Cambridge.
The HD4 programme brings together a world-class team of epidemiologists, clinicians, scientists, engineers, and architects. They will investigate how individuals live and move in Singapore, how the urban environment shapes their exposure to health risks, and how this influences their behaviour and health.
Prof Nick Wareham, HD4 Programme Lead at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Epidemiology Unit, University of Cambridge said: “As a city with ambitious plans for improving its citizens’ health, and a burgeoning research sector and rich health data, Singapore offers a unique setting for this work. HD4 will not only be studying the challenges of a growing city in the twenty-first century, but doing so in a city eager to implement strategies and tools to address them.”
A key element in HD4 is the collaboration with Singapore’s SG100K cohort study, which is analysing the factors influencing NCDs in a representative and fully consented sample of 100,000 Singaporeans. All data that HD4 will analyse is fully de-identified and securely processed.
Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology (President’s Chair), John Chambers, Programme Lead of the HD4 Programme and SG100K study at NTU Singapore’s Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, said: “By integrating environmental data with the health and behavioural data from SG100K, this research will deepen our understanding of how environmental and social factors shape health outcomes, and how we might change the built environment to reduce health risks and burdens.”
Read the full press release here.
HD4 is funded by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme.
