Neighborhoods are complex systems with spatial signals that help decode their stories. We integrate innovative GIScience, public health, and statistical approaches to explore, understand, and promote healthy places.
Research Program Themes
1.
Defining how place impacts & interacts with health
We focus on complexity surrounding the measurement, mapping, and distillation of multiple health outcomes and associated social determinants of health at varying scales, to gain a greater understanding of disease prevalence.
2.
Identifying disparities of access & health outcomes
In collaboration with clinical and public health teams, we explore the relationship of accessibility as a function of health outcomes, from food access disparities to availability of evidence-based medications for opioid use disorder.
3.
Building engaged, participatory infrastructures
We collaborate with policymakers, community members, researchers, and software engineers to brainstorm ways of integrating complex information about the natural, social, health, & built environments — using human-centered design thinking.
4.
Integrating spatial thinking in research design
Spatial effects can violate core components of the standard counterfactual framework used for evaluation, making treatment effects difficult to assess. We refine and improve methods to consider & account for spatial interactions.
Select Research Projects
Since early 2020, we’ve made spatial statistics accessible in the web browser, encouraging users to explore the pandemic from its start to today. In the latest push, we’re humanizing the data with oral histories from across the country. We also explore how regional social determinants of health impact COVID.
Place and Social-Spatial Networks
We have multiple projects exploring how neighborhood connections between people can be better understood to prioritize places, individuals, or groups for life-saving and harm-reducing health interventions.
Measuring Opioid Risk Environments
We are the geospatial core leads at the JCOIN Methodology and Advanced Analytics Resource Center, and collaborate with many other teams to measure opioid risk environments, access to medication for opioid use disorder, and implement quasi-experimental research designs to evaluate spatial impacts.
Decision Supports for Environmental Justice
A handful of key metrics―tree cover, air pollution estimates, heat island effects, traffic volumes, and social vulnerability index― help to reveal where in the city people face particular challenges. Following years of collaboration with different groups, we’re now fine-tuning ChiVes to support community efforts.
Latest News from HeRoP Lab
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Communities of Resilience: Urbana Farmers Market Interviews
How has Covid-19 affected your community? Even within communities, the question generates a variety of answers. The US Covid Atlas team, in partnership with Truth and Documentary, asked patrons of the Urbana Farmers’ Market various questions about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. This was a community event expanding the Atlas Stories, which connects Covid… Read more
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September Speaker Series: Alavez on Grief & Loss
Join us this Friday for our first talk of the HEROP Speakers Series, and we’re excited to co-sponsor with the Department of Geography & GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Read more
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COVID & Rural America: Assets & Challenges
This community event was the third in a series of workshops co-sponsored by the US COVID Atlas, a project of the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab (HEROP). The workshops aim to connect with communities disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 Pandemic, share resources, and discuss how to effectively translate data into action. As such, our third… Read more
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Thank you 2022/2023 RAs!
In May 2023, 8 Healthy Regions Research Assistants graduated and migrated. We are thankful for their meaningful contributions and wish them the best in their future endeavors. Graduating RAs We are so proud of our 2023 graduates! These RAs worked at the HeRoP Lab as they completed their studies. Dr. Wataru Morioka earned his Ph.D.… Read more
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Three Years Later: An Overview
COVID-19: Three Years Later is the second workshop of a three-part community-based webinar series co-sponsored by the US COVID Atlas, a project of the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab (HeRoP). The goal of this workshop was to discuss the Pandemic’s unequal effects on Black communities. Keynote speaker, Jamelle Watson-Daniels from Harvard University, spoke about… Read more
Looking for a research experience?
Our team is fully staffed! We are not hiring new staff or UIUC student hourly researchers at this time. To get on the waitlist, contact us with your interest and resume.
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab is supported in part by the following organizations.
Healthy Regions & Policies Lab 