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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The 2025 SDOH & Place Symposium
From June 14th to 15th in Chicago, the SDOH & Place Project Symposium showcased the incredible dedication and innovative approaches of our community in addressing social determinants of health and place-based inequities. Fifteen SDOH & Place Fellows showcased their web mapping applications centered in equity, while community and health leaders joined to share progress in… Read more
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Understanding GIS and Health Geography in Dr. Kolak’s New Publication
Dr. Kolak’s chapter on GIS & Health Geography provides a background on how health geography emerged and was shaped as a field when connected with GIScience perspectives and GISystems, generating new insight into health processes. This chapter updates the previous entry written by Professor Mei Po Kwan in 2014. Read more
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November Speaker Series: Making Smell Count
Making Smell Count: Invoking olfactory experience in urban wellbeing and spatial analysis. Join us for lunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Friday, November 21st, at 12 PM CST. Lunch will be served from 12-12:30pm, so please join us in person a bit early to eat & mingle! Read more
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Join Us at APHA 2025: Visit Booth #1418!
It’s not our first time presenting at APHA, the nation’s premiere public health conference, but it is our first time at the Exhibit Hall! Find us at Booth #1418. Read more
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October Speaker Series: Grad School FAQ
Grad School FAQ: A Panel Discussion Demystifying the Grad School Application Process & How to Prepare Your Applications Join us for lunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Friday, October 31st, at 12 PM CDT. Lunch will be served from 12-12:30pm, so please join us in person a Read more
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Innovations in Mapping Health & Structural Drivers of Disease & Well-Being
Our editorial team (Dr. Kolak with Dr. Yanjia Cao and Dr. Michael Desjardins, Ph.D.) is thrilled to share that the our Collection at the Journal of Maps has been released, built and carefully curated over the past three years!! 😮 🤯 Check it out now at JOM. Read more
Looking for a research experience?
We are not hiring other 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 