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
-
March Speaker Series: ConnectedNest
ConnectedNest: Addressing Unmet Health Related Social Needs of People with Cancer Using Local Community Based Organizations. Join us for brunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Friday, March 14th, at 10 AM CDT. Brunch will be served from 10-10:10am, so please join us in person a bit early Read more
-
The Urgency of SDOH Data
The Urgency of SDOH Data: Increasing Access w/ Human-Centered Data Science Join us for lunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Thursday, Feb. 6th at 12:30 PM CDT. Lunch will be served from 12-12:30p, so please join in person a bit early to eat & mingle! The Healthy Read more
-
GIS Day 2024 – Community Georeferencing of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps
This past GIS Day, November 20th, 2024, we at the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab hosted a “georeference-a-thon,” and created historical map mosaics of Champaign-Urbana in 1915. Read more
-
SDOH & Place Fellowship—Call for Applications 2025
SDOH & Place Fellowship 2025 Applications Open! January 21, 2025 Herop Lab The SDOH & PLACE Fellowship is a part-time virtual program of the new SDOH & Place Project, sponsored by the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with funding in part from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Throughout Read more
-
Geospatial Data Science in Drug Use Research
Virtual NIDA Workshop on Geospatial Data Science Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2024 Time: 12-4PM EST (9-1PM PST) Register here | Agenda posted here Join the National Institutes on Drug Abuse in a virtual webinar to explore how we can harness the power of geospatial data science to advance our understanding of the epidemiology, prevention, and treatment of drug Read more
-
Call for SDoH Measurement “Research Guide” Reports
Generate a public-friendly short report on the measurement of a specific social determinant of health topic for a national RWJF project: SDOH & Place. There is greata ootential to expand your report with an expert in your field to a manuscript, leveraging access to a network of scholars studying Community-Level SDOH. U.S. based scholars participating… 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 