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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Mar 5: Gentrification Seminar Series Event
March Seminar Series: Gentrification Friday, March 5th from 2-3pm CST, Register via Zoom Join the HeRoP Lab this Friday, March 5th for a seminar series event focused on the multidisciplinary and multidimensional topic of Gentrification. We will have presentations and discussion from a leading expert on the topic as well as emerging work from student scholars. Dr. Somashekhar will provide… Read more
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Feb 19: The US Covid Atlas @ Computation + Journalism Symposium 2021
The US COVID Atlas project will be presenting insights and reflections on the recent development of the Atlas 2.0 at the Northeastern Computation + Journalism Symposium, Data Journalism in an Expanded Field. Details below! Feb 19, 2021, Register Here Speaker: Dylan Halpern, Principal Software Engineer COVID-19 has dominated attention, media, and life around the world in… Read more
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Feb 5: The Black Butterfly by Lawrence Brown
The Black Butterfly: The Harmful Politics of Race and Space in America HEROP Seminar Series & Book Release Event Feb 5, 2020 at 2pm CST, Register via Zoom by Lawrence T. Brown (Director, The Black Butterfly Project) The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray’s… Read more
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Jan 8: Communicating Complexity by Dylan Halpern
Join us for our January Healthy Regions and Policies (HeRoP) lab meeting, where Principal Software Engineer Dylan Halpern will talk about amplifying geospatial research with webmapping and interaction. Read more
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Introducing HEROP!
We’re excited to share the new Healthy Regions & Policies Lab (HEROP), formalized across multiple projects and growing collaborations. image by opensourceway :: CC BY-SA 2.0 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 