Dr. Charlie Zhang is a professor in the Department of Geographic & Environmental Sciences at the University of Louisville (UofL). He also serves as a Ph.D. faculty member in Urban Planning & Public Affairs and is the GIS navigator for the Center for Integrative Environmental Health Sciences at UofL. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in 2006.

Dr. Zhang is an urban and health geographer specializing in demographic analysis, urban crime, environmental exposure, health disparities, and applications of mapping and geospatial analysis methods. His research addresses both community-level challenges and broader investigations into the environmental and health impacts of development, urbanization, and pollution at national and global scales.

His representative projects span a wide range of pressing public health and environmental issues. These include assessing children’s neurobehavioral risks from exposure to fly ash near coal‑fired power plants; diagnosing cancer disparities in rural Kentucky; analyzing associations between proximity to coal ash impoundments and elevated rates of cancer and birth defects; and evaluating the health impacts of lead exposure from aging housing stock and contaminated soil. He has also examined school segregation and white flight in urban areas, mapped spatial patterns and neighborhood correlates of crime, housing foreclosure, and opioid overdoses, and investigated the spatiotemporal aspects of urban sprawl and air pollution in metropolitan areas.