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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Fall Hourly Design Research Assistant—Call for Applications
Fall Hourly Design Research Assistant The Healthy Regions and Policies Lab at the Department of Geography & GIScience (UIUC) is seeking an undergrad or grad hourly student assistant with dynamic and creative skills to join our team. The ideal candidate will have a passion for design and storytelling. This role will involve a variety of Read more
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Fall Hourly Communications Research Assistant—Call for Applications
Fall Hourly Communications Research Assistant The Heathy Regions and Policies Lab and the Department of Geography & GIScience (UIUC) is seeking an undergrad or grad hourly student assistant with dynamic and creative skills to join our team. The ideal candidate will have a passion for content creation, event hosting, and archiving. This role will involve Read more
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International Medical Geography Symposium – Atlanta 2024
HeRoP Lab members visited Atlanta, Georgia earlier this summer to engage in rich discussions and present at the 2024 International Medical Geography Symposium. Read more
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The Inaugural SDOH & Place Project 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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Dr. Morioka at CaGIS+UCGIS
At the 2024 CaGIS+UCGIS Symposium, Wataru, a postdoctoral researcher in the HeRoP lab, was awarded the ICA Scholarship by the International Cartographic Association (ICA). This scholarship aims to “support early career scholars and professionals in advancing their careers in cartography and GIScience.” Wataru also presented a poster titled “Short-term Course for High School Students to Read more
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May Speaker Series: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Sustainability
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Urban Sustainability: Insights from the LEAM Lab Join us for lunch, learning, and conversation at the next installment of the HEROP Speaker Series on Friday, May 31st at noon. Coffee and networking session to follow. For folks outside of the UIUC community, please join us via Zoom! Brian Deal, PhD & Moazam 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 