The SDOH & Place Symposium

Join us this June to build community, spark dialogue, and strike inspiration around the Social Determinants of Health & Place.

• Friday, June 14th – Saturday June 15th
• At the the Illini Center, 200 S. Wacker Drive, Chicago, Illinois
• Apply to give a talk here: go.illinois.edu/SDOHPlace-Symposium

What is the SDOH & Place Project about?

The SDOH & Place Project works to build a community of practice around defining & using community-level social determinants of health, and also demystifying application design thinking crucial to developing web applications centered on neighborhood health.

Our main goals:

• Develop a new Community Toolkit to aid in web application development for those in the realm of health equity. 
• Building a community through discussions on defining SDOH and using SDOH data.
• Engaging new types of collaborations and applications with design justice.

Over the past year, we’ve worked to develop, fortify, and advance an open ecosystem for communities that makes working with place-based SDOH data, and application development within health equity, more accessible, enjoyable, and empowering. Using a new toolkit, the first cohort of SDOH & Place Fellows have been developing their apps with free and/or open-source software, centered on equity & engaged with human-centered design.

At the same time, we’ve been building out a new map-based search platform for SDOH data discovery, our Data Discovery Tool, that will curate, index, and integrate geospatial data relevant to public health at multiple scales. We’re excited to link cutting edge work on search and large language models (LLMs) with partnerships from the GeoBlacklight community, a national network of librarians, user experience researchers & designers, search & metadata experts, and computer scientists.

At the first SDOH & Place Symposium this June, the community will meet to share progress, break bread, celebrate achievements, and learn from each other. Join us!

Why do we need you?

We would like to invite talented and passionate professionals to discuss topics around the Social Determinants of Health. Having someone like you attend our event will help our cohort be able to enhance their projects. You’ll also be the first to get a sneak peek at all the work we’ve been doing. Your insight and expertise are needed! 

Schedule

Friday, June 14th

• 2:00 pm – 🏁 Check-in & Welcome
• 3:00 pm – Session I – Community Talks
• 4:00 pm – 💬 Network & Mingle
• 4:30 pm – Session II – PechaKecha Lightning Session
• 5:30 pm – 🎉 Reception
• 7:00 pm – 🍱 Dinner with Colleagues

Saturday, June 15th

• 8:30 am – 🥐 Breakfast
• 9:00 am – Keynote by Malaika Simmons
• 10:00 am – Session III – SDOH Fellow Projects
• 11:00 am – ☕ Coffee Break
• 11:15 am – Session IV – SDOH Fellow Projects
• 12:15 pm – 🥗 Lunch & Discovery App Preview by Engineering & Design Teams
• 1:30 pm – Session V – SDOH Fellow Projects
• 2:00 pm – Session VI – Environmental Justice in Chicago
• 3:00 pm – 👋🏽 Closing & ☕ Coffee Departure

Symposium Details

• Registration is limited due to space availability.
• Sessions will be live streamed and recorded for future sharing.
• All applicants should include a proposal for a talk, lightning talk, or reason for attending (250 words MAX). Special consideration will be given to applicants who propose a talk or lightning talk.

Deadline to submit this application is the end of May or when spots are filled. All applicants will be notified of their application decision on a rolling basis.

There is no symposium registration cost. For accepted applicants, food will be provided at the conference at no additional cost, however lodging and travel to Chicago will be the applicant’s responsibility for non-Fellows.

A select number of travel awards may be made available to offset cost; please indicate your interest when completing the application.

About the Team

The SDOH & Place Project is led by the Health Regions and Policies Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with support in part by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The team is grateful for collaboration and partnerships with Stakeholder and Technical Advisory Boards, UIUC SDOH Super User Group, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Siebel Center for Design, the Center for Spatial Data Science at the University of Chicago, both Departments of Geography & GIScience as well as Computer Science at UIUC, and the invaluable business office team at the School for Earth, Society, and the Environment at UIUC.