Summer Institute on GIS & Public Health
June 10-12, 2008
Penn’s Center for Public Health Initiatives, Cartographic Modeling Lab, and College of General Studies are proud to present the 4th annual Summer Institute on GIS & Public Health, an intensive workshop for researchers and administrators on the use of geographic information systems and spatial analysis to improve health and quality of life.
This unique institute is designed as a practical introduction to the use of computer mapping and spatial analysis to inform public health decision-making, programs and policy. Leading scholars and research professionals will discuss how they apply the latest GIS technology to understand how the environment impacts public health.
- Who Should Attend?
- Schedule
- Sponsors
- Registration
- Continuing Education Units
- Lodging
- Readings for Registered Attendees
- Beginning to intermediate GIS users
- Public health researchers
- Public health administrators
- city planners
- Policy-makers
- Graduate students
The Summer Institute provides numerous opportunities for active participation, from hands-on GIS training to discussion opportunities with speakers and fellow participants.
Monday - June 9th
Hands-on GIS Instruction: Part I - Optional $400 Supplement
Kennen Gross
This full-day session, led by Kennen Gross, will be taught in a computer lab and will introduce participants to ArcGIS 9.2 software. Topics including mapping census data, aggregating and linking data, and geo-coding addresses will be covered. No prior experience with ArcView or GIS is expected. Mr. Gross is a doctoral candidate n Penn's Graduate School of Education whose research combines public health, child development and education with GIS and statistical analysis.
Tuesday - June 10th
Morning Lecture: Using administrative data to measure the environment for health and social science research
Dennis Culhane, PhDDr. Dennis Culhane and staff from the Cartographic Modeling Lab (CML) will describe the Philadelphia – University of Pennsylvania model for archiving administrative data, through both the Kids Integrated Database System (KIDS) and the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System (NIS) projects. Specifically, he will describe the methods used for data aggregation and distribution and research methods that can be used to develop and analyze more refined measures of environmental factors.
Dr. Culhane is a social psychologist and Professor of Social Welfare Policy at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty co-director of the Cartographic Modeling Lab. He is currently directing several collaborative efforts between the University and the City of Philadelphia to make administrative records more readily analyzable and sharable for policy analysis and planning purposes. These efforts involve the creation of interactive, web-based software applications, and the creation of an archival data system for tracking children through various school and social service programs. His research interests include studies of the housing and neighborhood factors associated with health, and the neighborhood factors associated with child and youth development
Afternoon Computer Lab: Cartographic Modeling
C. Dana Tomlin, PhD
Reading: Cartographic ModelingDr. Dana Tomlin will introduce “Cartographic Modeling,” a GIS-based methodology that can be used to address a wide variety of analytical mapping applications. Cartographic modeling is based on “map algebra” in which cartographic layers for individual characteristics such as soil type, land value, or population are treated as variables that can be transformed or combined into new variables. Just as conventional algebraic operations (such as adding, subtracting, multiplying, or dividing) might be combined into a complex system of simultaneous equations, these cartographic operations (such as superimposing one map onto another or measuring distances or travel times) might be combined into a model of health risks or access to health services.
Dr. Tomlin is a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as a faculty co-director of the Cartographic Modeling Lab, and a Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Dr. Tomlin’s work focuses on the development and application of geographic information systems (GIS). As designer of the Map Analysis Package GIS, author of Geographic Information Systems and Cartographic Modeling and originator of the Map Algebra language embodied in most of today’s raster-based GIS software, Dr. Tomlin is recognized as a leading contributor to this field.
Afternoon Lecture: Assets Mapping using a Community-Based Participatory Research Approach
Tara Hayden, MHSA
Nicole Thomas, MBA
Marina Barnet, MSW, PhDThis session will describe an asset-mapping project initiated by the Philadelphia Area Research Community Collaboration (PARCC), a community-based research advisory group committed to the principles of Community-based Participatory Research (CBPR). The project is designed to map and analyze community assets in West and Southwest Philadelphia relating to violence prevention, cardiovascular, and mental health. Team members will discuss field data collection, community interviews, and the principles of asset mapping and CBPR, particularly the emphasis on assets rather than deficits.
Tara Hadyen is the Assistant Director EXPORT Center of Excellence for Inner City Health. Nicole Thomas is a research coordinator with the Philadelphia Collaborative Violence Prevention Center. Marina Barnett is an Associate Professor at Widener University's Center for Social Work Education.
Wednesday - June 11th
Morning Lecture I: Mapping Disease Outbreak and Emergency Response
Vic Spain, DVM, PhD.
The epidemiology division of the City of Philadelphia's Department of Public Health uses GIS and spatial analysis to track diseases, such as Lyme disease and shigellosis, and to plan for the city's emergency response to potential disease outbreaks. This presentation will address issues relating to data collection and privacy as well as methods used to distinguish disease "hot spots" from random patterns.Dr. Spain works as a Bioterrorism and Communicable Disease Epidemiologist with the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
Morning Lecture II: Three-city Study of Outdoor Advertisements
Amy Hillier, MSW, PhD
Latifah Griffin
Reading: Outdoor Alcohol Advertising Near SchoolsLearn how GPS, digital cameras, GIS, spatial regression, and hot-spot analysis were used in a study of outdoor advertising in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Austin. Research questions focused on whether outdoor ads for unhealthy products were more prevalent in ethnic minority and low-income neighborhoods and clustered around child-serving institutions.
Dr. Hillier is an Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning in the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania and a faculty co-director of the Cartographic Modeling Lab. She teaches classes in GIS and research methods and has served as the faculty director for Penn’s Master of Urban Spatial Analytics program. Her research focuses on geographic disparities in housing and health, including historical mortgage redlining, food access, and childhood obesity. Latifah Griffin worked as a research assistant on the billboard study while she was an undergraduate at Cheyney University. Ms. Griffin is now a full-time research assistant at the Center for Tobacco Research at the University of Pennsylvania.
Afternoon Computer Lab: Point Pattern Analysis
Tony E. Smith, PhD
Reading: Small Area Clustering of Cases of Pneumococcal BacteremiaThis session will feature hands-on computer training in some of the point-pattern analysis methods described during the morning presentation. Dr. Smith will walk participants through an analysis of disease data using tools in ArcView GIS 9.2 and programs written for Matlab software.
Dr. Smith’s primary area of research is in the theory and application of probabilistic models to spatial interaction behavior. Specific interests focus on structural analysis and axiomatic foundations of such models. Related areas of interest are in probabilistic theories of choice behavior, spatial statistical analysis and GIS. A secondary area of Dr. Smith’s research is in transportation and land use modeling. Specific interests focus on network equilibrium models of traffic flows and general equilibrium models of urban land use.Afternoon Lecture: Visual methods in social epidemiology
Carolyn Cannuscio, ScD, and Eve Weiss, M.S.This session, led by Dr. Carolyn Cannuscio and Ms. Eve Weiss, will examine the collection and use of visual data to inform epidemiological research. Dr. Cannuscio and Ms. Weiss will discuss the use of photographs as tools for systematic social observation, elicitation of rich interview data, and bridging of divergent social worlds. Selected exercises will highlight how visual data can illuminate the social context for health.
Dr. Cannuscio, Assistant Professor in Family Medicine and Community Health at Penn, is a social and chronic disease epidemiologist and a recent RWJ Health & Societies Scholar. She is co-principal investigator of the Health of Philadelphia Photo Documentation Project, a community-based participatory effort to identify urban residents’ health concerns. Eve Weiss, M.S. directs strategy for the Health of Philadelphia Photo-documentation Project. Her professional background includes health policy analysis, scientific writing, journalism, and philanthropic work. In addition to Penn's Leonard Davis Institute for Health Economics, Ms. Weiss works with other nonprofit and academic institutions, including The What To Expect Foundation, which provides prenatal and pediatric health information, materials and education to low-income families. She co-authored the chapter, “Health Literacy and Maternal Empowerment” in the soon-to-be published book, Perspectives in Perinatal Mental Health. Ms. Weiss studied anthropology at UC Berkeley and health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Thursday - June 12th
Morning Lecture I: Neighborhoods and Violence
Doug Wiebe, PhDKey goals of geo-health research are to better understand where people spend time and the potential for activity locations to affect health. Dr. Doug Wiebe will discuss ways that GIS is being used to better understand location-specific risks for violence in the context of his NIH-funded study tracking gunshot victims.
Dr. Wiebe is an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow with the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics. His research merges theory and methods from multiple disciplines including epidemiology, public health, criminology, and social ecology. Much of his work seeks to understand the implications of peoples' daily activities on the risks to their health.
Morning Lecture II: Geographic Access to Healthcare
Charlie Branas, PhD
Reading: Trauma Center Location Planning Gets ReliefThere are many factors that influence access to healthcare facilities. Very important among these factors is geographic access. In this workshop, Dr. Branas will explore various approaches and pitfalls to describing geographic access to healthcare facilities through mapping as well as location science and optimization of healthcare facility situation within the community.
Dr. Branas’ methodological interests combine aspects of health policy, operations research and epidemiology. His research interests include emergency health systems and injury prevention. This research most prominently includes an NIH-funded study of alcohol outlets and firearm violence in the city of Philadelphia. Dr. Branas’ current research is also national in scope, including a multi-state study of trauma centers and ambulance care funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. Dr. Branas is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biostatics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Morning Lecture III: How do Neighborhoods Influence Behavior? Examples from Mental Health and Substance Abuse
Jeremy Mennis, PhDOne of the grand challenges in the social and health sciences is understanding how place influences human behavior – how where you live, work, and play affect decisions-making. This workshop will focus on how to quantify characteristics of the socioeconomic and built environments, integrate this place-based information with characteristics of individuals, and model the influence of place on individual behavior in the context of public health. These principles will be demonstrated using case studies of mental health treatment outcomes and adolescent substance abuse in Philadelphia.
Dr. Mennis is an Associate Professor of Geography and Urban Studies at Temple University. Previously, he was Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Colorado from 2001-2004. He has theoretical research interests in the computational representation and analysis of spatio-temporal phenomena, as well as applied research interests in the spatial analysis of urban health and crime. He has published in journals such as International Journal of Geographical Information Science, International Journal of Remote Sensing, and Annals of the Association of American Geographers, and has received funding from agencies such as NASA, NSF, NIH, and NIJ. Dr. Mennis currently serves on the editorial board of Compass Geography.
Luncheon
On the final day of the three-day course, a celebration luncheon will be organized. The featured speaker during the luncheon will be Shiriki Kumanyika, PhD, MPH. Dr. Kumanyika is a Senior Advisor to the Penn Center for Public Health Initiatives, Founding Director of Penn’s MPH Program and is the Associate Dean for Health Promotion and Disease Prevention in the School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Kumanyika's research focuses on the role of nutritional factors in the primary and secondary prevention of chronic diseases, with a particular focus on obesity and related health problems such as hypertension and diabetes. She has chaired the U.S. National Nutrition Monitoring Advisory Committee, served on two U.S. Dietary Guidelines Committees, on the Public Health Service Commission on Dietary Supplement Labels, and as a consultant to the Centers for Disease Control. She is a member of the Institute of Medicine and chairs the Prevention Reference Group of the International Obesity Task Force. She is also a consultant to the World Health Organization Department of Nutrition for Health and Development and a member of the World Cancer Research Fund Expert Panel on Diet, Nutrition and Cancer. Dr. Kumanyika is currently an elected member of the American Public Health Association Executive Board and was recently appointed as Vice Chair of the Department of Health and Human Services Advisory Committee that will make recommendations for Healthy People 2020 objectives.
Afternoon Lecture: Mapping for advocacy: A successful strategy for policy research
Allison Karpyn, ScD
Reading: The Need for More Supermarkets in PhiladelphiaThis session will review the process undertaken by The Food Trust and its partners to successfully raise awareness of relevant policy issues through the use of GIS mapping. The session will examine the foundations of the approach both philosophically and practically and discuss its recent applications in Pennsylvania, New York, Illinois and Louisiana. Dr. Karpyn will also discuss the advantages of developing in-house GIS capacity versus partnering with outside GIS experts.
Dr. Karpyn is Director of Research and Evaluation at The Food Trust, a Philadelphia-based non-profit organization committed to providing access to affordable nutritious foods. Dr. Karpyn also teaches courses in program planning and evaluation and community assessment in the MPH program at Drexel University. Dr. Karpyn is a member of The American Public Health Association, Society for Public Health Education and the American Evaluation Association and certified as a professional researcher by the Marketing Research Association.
Friday - June 13th
Hands-on GIS Instruction: Part 2 - Optional $400 Supplement
Kennen GrossThis session, led by Kennen Gross, will build on the basic GIS functions in ArcGIS 9.2 covered in Part I and teach participants how to conduct spatial queries, create buffers and calculate distance, and make raster density and 3D maps. This session is intended for people who participated in Part I or who have some previous experience with GIS.
ESRI
ESRI is the world leader in the GIS software industry, offering innovative mapping solutions that help people create, visualize, analyze and present information better and more clearly. ESRI’s business involves the development and support of GIS software for all types of organizations, form the one-person office to multinational corporations to innovative Internet GIS solutions. For more information, please visit www.esri.com.
Leonard Davis Institute
The Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI) is the center of the University of Pennsylvania's activities and programs in health services research, health policy, and health care management executive education. A formal cooperative venture among Penn's schools of medicine, business, nursing, and dental medicine, LDI works to improve the health of the public through multidisciplinary studies on the medical, economic, social, and ethical issues that influence how health care is organized, financed, managed, and delivered. LDI represents one of the earliest efforts to promote collaborative scholarship in health care through formal partnerships within the same university among the clinical, management, and social sciences.
The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania
The Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program at the University of Pennsylvania aims to develop leaders who will produce significant scholarship, design interventions, and build the infrastructure and prestige of a new field focused on the multiple determinants of health. Penn's program is based on an eclectic and expansive vision of the kinds of knowledge and actions that are needed to improve the nation's health. Over 50 core faculty are drawn from Penn's schools of medicine, arts and sciences, communication (Annenberg), business (Wharton), social work, fine arts, nursing, and law. Penn's history of interdisciplinary collaboration, location in Philadelphia and compact campus facilitate a unique interdisciplinary atmosphere for conducting research and training new leaders.
Penn Institute for Urban Research
The Penn Institute for Urban Research is dedicated to fostering increased understanding of cities and developing new knowledge bases that will be vital in charting the course of local national and international urbanization. By providing an umbrella structure for the urban focused scholarship, research and civic engagement within Penn’s twelve schools, the Penn IUR provides the synergy needed to address urban challenges in the 21st century. As a campus-wide institute, Penn IUR sponsors a number of initiatives, stimulates research, provides opportunities for collaborative instruction and engages with the world of practitioners and policymakers.
The course fee of $1,250 includes attendance at all lectures, labs and case studies and continental breakfast and lunch, Tuesday through Thursday, in addition to the overview of the CML. The optional Introduction to ArcView GIS on Monday and the optional Intermediate ArcView GIS on Friday are an additional $400 each.
For more information call 215-573-3439 or email wvoet@exchange.upenn.edu.
Attendance is limited to 20 participants in the optional labs and 40 participants in the Tues-Thurs program. Participants are registered on a fully paid, first-served basis.
Register: Click here to Register Online
One and a half Continuing Education Unites (1.5 CEUs) are available for those who complete the workshop and attend all lectures, labs and case studies (a total of 15 hours).
On-Campus Housing
Space will be provided in air-conditioned multi-occupancy suites with private bedrooms and a shared living space and bathroom. Rooms feature an extra-long twin bed, desk and dresser per person at a rate of $65 plus tax per person, per night. Linen will be provided consisting of a pre-made bed, towels, a washcloth and a complimentary welcome kit including shampoo, soap, etc. Please note that there is a 3 night minimum and you will be staying in a residence hall on campus.
Sheraton University City
Located directly adjacent to Penn’s campus and close to fine restaurants, museums and shopping. The rooms offer oversized desks and Internet connectivity, and guests have access to an executive fitness center, a swimming pool, the Top Dog Sports Grille and an Enterprise Rent-A-Car agency. If you are interested in reserving a room, please call 877-459-1146 and ask for the GIS and Public Health rate of $180 if you are in the private sector or the Health Department rate of $139 if you work in the government sector. 14% tax to both rates is applicable. Rooms must be booked by 5/9/2008 to honor these rates.
6/10/08 Lecture #1 (Dr. Dennis Culhane)
- Where The Homeless Come From
- Employing community data to investigate social and structural dimensions of urban neighborhoods: An early childhood education example
- The Development of Community Information Systems to Support Neighborhood Change
6/10/08 Lecture #2 (Dr. Dana Tomlin)
6/11/08 Lecture #2 (Dr. Amy Hillier and Ms. Latifa Griffin)
6/11/08 Lecture #3 (Dr. Tony Smith)
6/12/08 Lecture #2 (Dr. Charlie Branas)
6/12/08 Lecture #4 (Dr. Allison Karpyn)