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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Does Access to Medications for Opioid Use Disorder Match Community Vulnerability?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruption and shortage of treatment options for people with opioid use disorder (OUD) has been linked to significantly higher rates of overdose deaths across the country. How might an improved understanding of current community-level availability of medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD) inform future responses to pandemics or natural disasters Read more
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Listen: Marketplace highlights new research on internet access
Cross-posted from Atlas Insights: The US Covid Atlas blog. The nationally syndicated radio show and podcast Marketplace Tech interviewed postdoctoral scholar and US Covid Atlas co-lead Dr. Qinyun Lin (pictured above) this week on our latest research exploring the social determinants of health associated with higher COVID-19 mortality across different regions and communities. Published in the journal JAMA Network Read more
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Assessment of Structural Barriers and Racial Group Disparities of COVID-19 Mortality
COVID-19 highlights disparities in healthcare access & challenges facing US counties. Our team’s article in JAMA Network Open identifies relationships between structural barriers & racial/ethnic disparities of COVID mortality using spatial analysis. Data for the whole country available by race and age is at the regional scale – not every state provides race and age Read more
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Big Data, Government Policy and Defeating COVID
This month, Dr. Kolak of HEROP connected with leading scholars to discuss how data can be used to inform policy to defeat COVID, the emerging wave in Hong Kong, what happened in the US via the Covid Atlas, & brainstorming international, evidence-based cooperations to combat pandemics. More information about the talk can be found at Read more
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New RAs Join the Lab on Opioid Environment, Redlining Research Projects
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab is thrilled to welcome three new RAs and five returning RAs for the Winter 2022 term. HEROP Research Assistants (RAs) are UChicago students from multidisciplinary academic and professional backgrounds that have taken coursework in and are passionate about applying spatial analysis and GIScience to real-world applications. RAs work closely Read more
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New Research on Dimensions of Uncertainty: A Spatiotemporal View of Five COVID-19 Datasets
Research scientists from the US COVID Atlas team at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab (HEROP) are pleased to share their new article, Dimensions of Uncertainty: A Spatiotemporal View of Five COVID-19 Datasets, which was published this week in the journal Cartography and Geographic Information Sciences. Dylan Halpern, Qinyun Lin, and Marynia Kolak from HEROP 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 