GEOG 591 - GIS for Health

This course focuses on the growing role of geospatial science and analysis in understanding human health and well-being. These fields of study combine several related and established geospatial approaches while incorporating emerging perspectives and tools from data science and machine learning.

This comes at a time when society is experiencing intense pressure on human health and well-being and the provisioning of adequate health and social support. For example, adverse health risks and impacts of climate change are accelerating, including more intense heat waves and other extreme weather, changing distributions of mosquito-borne disease, longer and more intense hurricane seasons, and other, more general effects on well-being and quality of life. There are other existing and new threats, such as the disease burden of malaria and emerging diseases such as COVID-19. Geospatial science and analysis aids our understanding of and can help identify solutions across this complex health and wellbeing landscape through the integration of a range of disciplines, datasets, and methods.

The course covers relevant techniques for analyzing health phenomena, such as methods for detecting areas of higher risk of disease and cartographic techniques for visualizing geospatial health data. The course also provides a foundation in relevant concepts from public health, epidemiology, and social medicine, and focuses on their geographic dimensions and diverse types of study design. Concepts and techniques are explained through weekly lessons, practical activities, and a term project. The approaches introduced are often mathematically complex, but the emphasis is on the choice and application of appropriate methods for the analysis of health and disease often encountered in applied geography as well as on developing a framework in which to approach the analysis. Topics range across data surveillance and infrastructure planning, modeling vector-borne diseases, planning for recovery through an evaluation of healthcare accessibility, cluster analysis, predicting health outcomes, and responding to outbreaks and epidemics.

Weekly projects are hands-on, using geographic information systems or other appropriate computational tools, so that students appreciate the practical complexities involved but also develop an understanding of the limitations of these methods. The term project is intended to allow students to formulate a research problem in a topic area of their choosing, to gather and organize appropriate available datasets, and to understand how different methods covered in the course can be applied in combination to thoroughly explore real questions. Students will be asked to engage with their peers' work during the project planning stage.