Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Spatial epidemiology is an important branch of Epidemiology applying geospatial and statistical methods to investigate spatial distribution of diseases and related determinants of health. Advances in geospatial technologies, big data sciences, and availability of high-resolution, geographically referenced health and environmental quality data have created unprecedented new opportunities for spatial epidemiology to investigate environmental and other factors in explaining local and geographic variations in population health. Nowadays, public health issues become more and more complicate, dynamic, and highly heterogeneity over space, for example, people movements and spread of infectious diseases, spatial inequality of healthcare accessibility, spatial variation in diseases and socio-economic determinants, and risks from various environmental exposures. Developments in disease mapping and exposure models, integrated knowledge across multiple disciplines, enhanced study design, and advanced methods to incorporate the time dimension, and the combination of individual-and-area-level information promise to improve our understanding for the complex relationships of environment and socioeconomics to population health.