Overall Mission

The mission of the HEROP Lab is to advance population health and health equity by measuring the multiple dimensions of place through the integration of geography, open GIS, computational social science, and community-informed design. 

Drawing on spatial epidemiology, socioecological theory, and spatial data science, we investigate how health inequities are produced and perpetuated across scales, with a particular focus on the community level, resource dynamics, and the lived experience of people, all in an effort to inform better policy aimed at eliminating these inequities.

Research Focus

Using a multidisciplinary approach covering GIS, public health, trauma-informed decision-making, human-centered design, and advanced computational engineering, our research program investigates how and where variations in health outcomes are produced and experienced, and what mechanisms are driving them. We specifically examine:

• How social, spatial, racial, built, and natural environment factors and structural drivers influence health and well-being; and
• How resource dynamics and multidimensional neighborhood structures shape health inequities over space and time.

Methodological Innovation and Translational Impact

We develop and apply innovative methods for representing and modeling place, and we translate this science into action. Our lab builds open-source, community-centered web applications for social change with and for communities, ensuring application design meets their needs. This work advances new directions in Humanistic GIS and socio-technological software development by integrating community-centered design principles to generate new, more equitable representations of place that can inform intervention.

Core Values & Lab Culture

Our scientific approach is grounded in a set of core values:

• Collaboration over Competition: Science is a collective effort. We prioritize shared learning, open science, and co-creation within supportive spaces.
• Strength through Diversity: Different viewpoints strengthen the rigor of research. We seek strength through diversity of people, perspectives, disciplines, and lived experiences.
• Equity and Justice: We explicitly examine racial, social, and structural drivers of health and work toward dismantling inequities by informing better policymaking.
• Community-Centered: We do research with and for communities, not on them. Community partnership guides our questions, methods, and tools, ensuring that what we build together can also be utilized together.
• Open and Humanistic: We build open GIScience tools and new kinds of knowledge infrastructures. We value human stories, spatial context, and technological approaches that support well-being and self-determination.

Long-Term Goal

To produce rigorous spatial evidence on the determinants of place-based health inequities and to deliver open, scalable geospatial tools that support community and regional health, well-being, and policy.