Dr Jun Wen.
An ECU-led team of tourism and health researchers were the only non-European winners at a gala international industry awards event in Spain.
The University of Barcelona's tourism and hospitality centre holds annual CETT Alimara Awards, which recognise projects contributing to an "innovative vision" to benefit the tourism, hotel and gastronomy sectors.
ECU's School of Business and Law (SBL) and Centre for Precision Health (CPH) have been collaborating to investigate the links between health and tourism, including the benefits associated with travel and the role health will play in shaping the tourism industry in the future.
SBL's Dr Jun Wen and CPH's Professor Wei Wang and PhD candidate Fangli Hu led the international team which won one of four research awards for its project, 'Developing vulnerability-friendly tourism destinations: Using an interdisciplinary approach with a focus on travel therapy.'
It investigates how the tourism industry can be more accommodating of travellers with non-communicable conditions – and why the industry needs to do so to flourish in years to come.
The awards panel praised the project for using applied research to help respond to the sector's challenges.
Accepting the honour via video, Dr Wen said news of the award came as a thrill.
"We continue to be surprised and delighted by our work's impact," he said.
"Interdisciplinary research is nothing new, but the pairing of tourism and medical science may appear to have come out of nowhere.
"We hope to learn more from interdisciplinary work in seemingly disparate areas such as tourism and medicine.
"Innovation can emerge from unusual collaborations, which may spark ideas to inform academia and the general public."
