2013 URISA GIS in Public Health Conference - Thursday Program Details
Concurrent Breakout Sessions
8:30 AM – 10:00 AM
Toxic Waste
- GIS for Community Air Quality: A Spatial Model of Diesel Exhaust
Jill Schulte, Research Assistant, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
- Healthcare Waste Management in Nigeria – A GIS Approach
Adeniyi Francis Fadairo, GIS Consultant, National Population Commission, Abuja, Nigeria
Kelechi Enweruzo-Amaefule, JSI/AIDSTAR-One Project, Abuja, Nigeria
Chronic Disease
- Factors Affecting Uptake of Cervical Cancer Screening in Nakasongola, Uganda
John Kamulegeya, MBChB, MPH Student, Makerere University, Uganda
- Spatiotemporal Clustering of Colorectal Cancer in Florida, 1981-2010
Naresh Kumar, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Miami, Miami, FL
- Examining Geospatial Clustering of Late-Stage Colorectal Cancer in Florida
Recinda Sherman, MPH, CTR, Senior Research Associate, Florida Cancer Data Systems, University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL
Stacey Tannenbaum, PhD, RD, LD/N, Assistant Scientist, Department of Epidemiology, University of Miami, Miller School of Medicine, Miami, FL
- Preparing for the Future: Are Caribbean Countries Positioned to Manage the Increase in Non-communicable Illnesses?
Patricia Boda, PhD, Associate Professor, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, TN
10:00 AM – 10:30 AM Beverage Break
Closing Plenary Session
10:30 AM – 12:00 PM
The conference will close with a discussion of lessons learned and an important keynote address from Andrew Curtis, GIS Health and Hazards Lab, Kent State University.
Closing Keynote - Health, Disasters and Crime: Working geospatially at the “scale” of intervention.
This presentation will focus on two topical areas linked by a field-based spatial technologies and analytical perspective: 1) the disasters and health nexus and 2) gun-related violence in “typical” US cities. These subject areas will be discussed using the "scale of intervention", meaning data collection, analysis and insight dissemination will occur at a scale relevant for stakeholders focused on intervention. This scale primarily consists of buildings (and the spaces between), streets, corners and block faces, and sub-neighborhood places. The talk will include a section on novel geospatial data collection technologies, especially spatial video that can enrich fine scale spatial analysis where previously either no data existed, was extremely expensive to collect, or existed at too coarse an aggregation to reveal patterns in and around domicile and activity spaces. These new mobile mapping approaches also facilitate longitudinal analysis, which is an imperative for dynamic landscapes.
This talk will primarily draw on five case studies: eight years of Hurricane Katrina research, spatial patterns of recovery after the Joplin Tornado of 2011, challenges in collecting data for a post-earthquake cholera-impacted town in Haiti, using epidemiological approaches to search for patterns in gunshots in Youngstown, Ohio, using mixed methods to develop a holistic neighborhood scale insight into crime – combining police and community geonarratives for one gang impacted neighborhood of Akron, Ohio
The talk will conclude with a few words regarding spatial confidentiality, and emerging concerns in the broadly defined area of GIS and Health.
Andrew Curtis is the Director of the GIS | Health & Hazards Lab and Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Kent State University. He is also a former Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and GIS for Public Health. His work employs novel geospatial technologies and analytical approaches to support neighborhood scale intervention strategies primarily focused on the reduction of health disparities across different topical areas and geographies. Examples of his health related GIS partnerships include different government departments of public health, especially Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, area hospitals and specialized clinics, non-profit organizations and community / neighborhood associations. With regards to the subject matter of this talk, in 2005 after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, he and his students were part of the academic team that helped with geospatial support for search and rescue operations in the Louisiana Emergency Operations Center (EOC). His geospatial recovery work continues in New Orleans and has extended to several other disasters, most notably post-tornado Joplin, Mo. He has developed fine scale data collection strategies for different “challenging” environments including cholera-impacted Haiti, and the slums in and around Dhaka, Bangladesh. He has also made several geospatial presentations linking health, hazards and crime at the sub-neighborhood scale to different Department of Justice audiences. He is currently working on projects with the Northern Ohio Violent Crime Consortium, especially Akron and Youngstown Police Departments on topics involving gun and gang violence. Curtis is also a recognized leader in the field of spatial confidentiality, which is an issue in all of the previously mentioned areas of research.
