URISA's GIS in Public Health Conference Program Announced

URISA is pleased to announce its Fourth GIS in Public Health Conference. The conference will take place in Miami, Florida, June 17-20, 2013 and is chaired by long-time program committee member, Jason K. Blackburn, PhD, Emerging Pathogens Institute & Department of Geography at the University of Florida. This biennial conference has been previously presented in New Orleans (2007), Providence (2009) and Atlanta (2011) and was established to provide an open and participatory forum for advancing the effective use of spatial information and geographic information system technologies across the domains of public health, healthcare and community health preparedness.

The educational program was developed through a peer review of submissions received through a Call for Presentations. The broad conference theme for the 2013 event is: Geospatial tools for understanding health issues related to the environment, human population, and animal populations and the intersections of the three.

Preconference courses will be taught on Monday, June 17:

• An Overview of Open Source GIS Software
• Detecting Clusters of Adverse Health Outcomes using SaTScan™
• Geospatial Data Collection for Micro-Environments and Multiple Time Periods: The Use of Spatial Video

The conference is honored to welcome Mei-Po Kwan (Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) as the opening keynote speaker. She will address GIS Methods for Analyzing GPS Data: Applications in Neighborhood and Health Research.

(Note: since this press release, Mei-Po Kwan had an unavoidable schedule conflict and had to cancel her participation. We are thrilled to announce that Dr. Estella Geraghty will now provide the opening keynote address.)

  Estella “Este” M. Geraghty, MD, MS, MPH, FACP, GISP, Assistant Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine, University of California Davis

Dozens of speakers from across the globe will discuss such topics as:

• 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
• GIS for Community Air Quality: A Spatial Model of Diesel Exhaust
  Jill Schulte, Research Assistant, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
  Julie Fox, PhD, Senior Fellow, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
• HealthGIS for Reaching the Unreached Population
  Paban Kumar Ghimire, Deputy Director, Department of Health Services, Nepal
• Macro Mapping of Dengue Virus Vector
  Lynette Akong, Bsc, Msc, Ministry of Planning and Sustainable Development, Trinidad and Tobago
• Spatial Modeling of Malaria Parasitemia in Young Children in Tanzania
  Rebecca Stallings, MHS Biostatistics Graduate Student, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO
• Comparing Primary Care Service Areas to Estimated Drive Times
  Sean Finnegan, MS, Research and GIS Data Manager, American Academy of Family Physicians, Washington, DC
• Remote Sensing and GIS Techniques for Monitoring Industrial Wastes for Amman City
  Raina Qutieshat, PhD, Lecturer, Balqa Applied University, Jordan
• Using Geospatial Mapping to Address the Burden of Diabetes in Durham County, NC
  Benjamin Strauss, MS, GIS Analyst, Children's Environmental Health Initiative, Ann Arbor, MI
  Nicole Sandberg, MURP, GIS Analyst, Children's Environmental Health Initiative, Ann Arbor, MI
• Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) in India: GIS is The Tool for Epidemiological Studies
  Arun Sharma, MD, Professor, University College of Medical Sciences, India
  Marilyn O'Hara, Clinical Associate Professor, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL
• Small-Area Geographies of Mental Health in England
  Nick Bearman,  Associate Research Fellow in GIS, European Centre for Environment and Human Health, University of Exeter Medical School, United Kingdom

The poster session is an important feature of the conference, with nearly 30 participants demonstrating their research on such important topics as:

• Does Place Make a Difference for Texas’ Adolescent and Young Adult Cancer Survival
  Deborah Vollmer Dahlke, MPAff, Director, Texas Life Science Foundation, Austin, TX
• Spatial Epidemiology of Highly Pathogenic of Avian Influenza A (H5N1) in Central Java & Yogyakarta Provinces, Indonesia
  Triwibowo Ambar Garjito, Health Epidemiologist and Molecular Biologist, Vector and Reservoir Diseases Research Center, Indonesia
• Bayesian Spatial Analysis of Teenage Pregnancy Rates in a Brazilian State
  Daiane Leite da Roza,  Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
• Kazakhstan Health Study : The Study of the Determinants of Metabolic Syndrome in Elderly Population
  Leila Utepova, MPH, Researcher, Center for Life Sciences, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan
  Alibek Kossumov, PhD, Senior Researcher, Center for Life Sciences, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan

Dr. Andrew Curtis, Director of the GIS Health and Hazards Lab at Kent State University will provide the closing keynote address on Thursday, June 20.

Early registration discounts are available until May 15 and sponsorship opportunities are plentiful.

For specific conference details and participation options, visit http://www.urisa.org/2013health