Physics Research: Hongying Li's Contribution to Physics Through a Cough

     Hongying Li is currently the China Programs Coordinator at EcoHealth Alliance in New York. She received her Master of Public Health from Emory University in 2015 after receiving her B.S. in Biosciences from Sun Yat-Sen University in 2012. She is currently working towards her PhD in Zoonotic Diseases and Human Behavior at Kingston University. She has dedicated her life to focus on improving the world through conservation and public health. Her main studies focus on the goal of enlightening people to the negatives of illegal wildlife trade and the ways it can alter your health. Her goal is to instill behavior changes in people causing the trade of wild animals to stop and ultimately prevent associated human health risks. Currently, a majority of her research has been focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has combined both of her passions creating an opportunity to spread her message even further than ever before.

In her most recent publication, Dispersion of Evaporating Cough Droplets in Tropical Outdoor Environment, she studied the physics behind the spread of a cough infected with SARS-CoV-2. Her and her colleagues discovered that a 100 µm droplet can travel up to 6.6 m under a wind speed of 2 m/s. Droplets greater than that were found on individuals 1 m away from the cougher and some went even further. It was also stipulated that coughing multiple times in a row or having a cough with a higher concentration of the virus can lead to even farther spread. These findings give the world insight on how far their coughs can go in certain conditions and develop our knowledge on spread through the use of physics.

Hongying Li is doing physics based research that can have a big impact on the world we know today. She is one of the many amazing scientists who are putting everything they have into helping our society get back to normal as soon as possible. Looking at all of the work she has managed to publish in such a short amount of time, there is no question that there is a lot more to come from her.

Li, H., Leong, F. Y., Xu, G., Ge, Z., Kang, C. W., & Lim, K. H. (2020). Dispersion of evaporating cough droplets in tropical outdoor environment. Physics of Fluids, 32(11), 113301. doi:10.1063/5.0026360

Hongying Li. (2017, February 01). Retrieved November 04, 2020, from https://www.ecohealthalliance.org/personnel/hongying-li