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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October Seminar & Journal Club on Neighborhood Change
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab & the Center for Spatial Data Science Invites You: Sequence Methods in the Study of Neighborhood Change Wei Kang, PhD University of California, Riverside Inland Center for Sustainable Development Tuesday, October 26th Invited Talk October 26th @9:00 CST (Register Here) There is a recent surge in research focused on Read more
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SSD Student Profile: Margot Bolanos-Gamez
Margot Bolanos-Gamez worked with the Healthy Regions + Policies Lab this summer as her summer RAship through the Social Institute in Social Research Methods (SSIRM). Organized by the Social Sciences Division (SSD) at UChicago, the Institute exposes students to the ins and outs of social science research through coursework, workshops and hands-on experience. Last summer, Read more
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Announcing RFP: Oral Histories Production Project
The US COVID Atlas aims to bring a human perspective to a world saturated with COVID-19 data. The US COVID Atlas (USCovidAtlas.org) is a free, interactive data visualization tool, led by the Healthy Regions + Policies Lab and Center for Spatial Data Science at UChicago, that connects COVID-19 data with community health contexts to deliver Read more
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AAG 2022 Call: Spatial Data Science for Impact
The Healthy Regions & Policies Lab and the Center for Spatial Data Science share an open call for proposals for in-person and/or virtual contributions for an AAG 2022 special session on Spatial Data Science for Impact. Read more
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Welcoming Fall 2021 Research Assistants
HEROP is thrilled to welcome three new and five returning student Research Assistants (RAs) for the Fall 2021 quarter at UChicago. Read more
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Investigating Particulate Matter Hotspots with Low-Cost Sensors
By Anastasia Montgomery, PhD Candidate, Northwestern University Anastasia is a PhD Candidate at Northwestern University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. Her research focuses on the interplay between air quality and climate change, integrating data science principles to analyze observational and simulated datasets. HEROP was thrilled to collaborate with Anastasia this summer this 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 