Presenters
Click on the presentation title for a brief abstract.
Keynote Address:
Clifford Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)
Cyberinfrastructure, New Research Opportunities, and the Reuse of Data
Clifford Lynch has been the Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) since July 1997. CNI, jointly sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries and Educause, includes about 200 member organizations concerned with the use of information technology and networked information to enhance scholarship and intellectual productivity. Prior to joining CNI, Lynch spent 18 years at the University of California Office of the President, the last 10 as Director of Library Automation. Lynch, who holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, is an adjunct professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. He is a past president of the American Society for Information Science and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Information Standards Organization. Lynch serves on the National Digital Preservation Strategy Advisory Board of the Library of Congress, Microsoft’s Technical Computing Science Advisory Board, the board of the New Media Consortium, and the Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access; he was a member of the National Research Council committee that published The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Infrastructure and Broadband: Bringing Home the Bits.
Plenary Session #1
Charles H. King, MD, Center for Global Health & Diseases, and Department of Epidemiology & Biostatistics, Case Western Reserve University
Microscope to Macroscope - Using GIS to Understand Environmental Complexity in Disease Causation
Dr. Charles King is Professor of International Health, based in the CWRU School of Medicine. His research focuses on the environmental factors leading to transmission of insect- and snail-borne infections such as malaria, filariasis and schistosomiasis, and on the human factors that determine development infection-associated disease in exposed individuals and communities. His population-based research has included studies in Kenya, Mexico, Brazil, Papua-New Guinea, and Cuyahoga County in Ohio, USA.
Plenary Session #2
Uriel Kitron, Environmental Studies, Emory University
West Nile Virus in Chicago: Considering the Past, Understanding the Present, Predicting the Future
Uriel Kitron's research and teaching programs center around the eco-epidemiology of infectious diseases, with an emphasis on tropical and emerging diseases and environmental risk factors. In his global health research he emphasizes anthropogenic changes, including issues of climate, urbanization, agricultural practices and conservation. For diseases such as dengue, Chagas disease, malaria, schistosomiasis and West Nile virus his group studies the ecology of the insect vectors and the mammalian reservoir hosts incorporating a strong field component (trapping mammals, collecting insects, identifying environmental features), spatial analysis, and laboratory work.
Current research efforts funded by NIH, NSF and CDC include large-scale collaborative studies international studies of malaria and schistosomiasis in Kenya, Chagas disease in Argentina and dengue in Peru, and of West Nile virus and Lyme disease in the US.
Project Seminar #1 [Choose between 2 speakers]
Shubhayu Saha, Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University
Minerals, Forest and Health - Does Resource Extraction undermine Human Development?
Shubhayu Saha is a doctoral student in Natural Resource Economics from the Department for Forestry and Environmental Resources at North Carolina State University. The broad focus in his research is to evaluate public policies at the intersection of environment, public health and development issues. In most of his empirical research, he uses spatially referenced household surveys combined with bio-physical spatial data to analyze feedback in coupled human-environment systems. As a consultant to the World Bank, he was part of a multi-disciplinary research team to assess the local health and environmental impacts of Iron Ore mining in India. In his dissertation, he is investigating the impacts of social networks and expansion in milk industry on land use choices of small farmers in the Brazilian Amazon. His dissertation research was supported by the Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant from the National Science Foundation.
Peter Tuckel, Department of Sociology, Hunter College, the City University of New York
The Diffusion of the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in Hartford, Connecticut
Peter Tuckel is professor of sociology at Hunter College, the City University of New York. Among his scholarly interests is the use of geographic information systems (GIS) to undertake historical research such as the diffusion of the influenza pandemic of 1918. He is currently conducting a GIS-based analysis of tuberculosis in Hartford, Connecticut during the period 1900-1930. He has published in academic journals including the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Social Science History, and Historical Methods.
Project Seminar #2 [Choose between 2 speakers]
Dave Wagner, Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics, Northern Arizona University
Using GIS to Understand the Ecology, Dispersal, and Evolutionary History of Diseases: Example using Anthrax, Plague, and Tularemia
Dave Wagner is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and the Associate Director of the Center for Microbial Genetics and Genomics at Northern Arizona University. Trained as a wildlife ecologist, he started to study infectious diseases when all of his study organisms were killed by plague. He now studies disease ecology and the evolutionary history of infectious diseases. His current research efforts, which are funded by NIH and DHS, are focused on plague, melioidosis, anthrax, and tularemia. He uses GIS extensively in his research and publications.
Nina Lam, Department of Environmental Studies, Louisiana State University
Reducing Uncertainties in Health Risk Assessment through GIS and Spatial Analysis
Nina Lam obtained her bachelor degree in Geography from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1975, and her master and doctoral degrees in Geography from the University of Western Ontario in 1977 and 1980, respectively. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Environmental Sciences at Louisiana State University (See http://info.envs.lsu.edu/lam.html).
Professor Lam’s research interests are in geographic information science, remote sensing, spatial analysis, and environmental health. She has published on and received research funding for topics such as spatial interpolation, cancer mortality studies in China, fractals and scale, AIDS in America, land cover change detection, uncertainties in health risk assessment, data mining, and modeling business return amid post-catastrophe uncertainties. In 1983, she received the Andrew McNally best paper award for her article on Spatial interpolation methods. Her edited book Fractals in Geography, published in 1993 by Prentice-Hall, was reprinted in 2003 by the Blackburn Press. Professor Lam’s research on the AIDS epidemic in the United States was featured in various media in the mid-1990s. With support from NASA, Professor Lam and her collaborators developed the software called ICAMS (Image Characterization And Modeling System) in early 1990s.
During 1999-2001, Professor Lam was appointed as the Program Director of the Geography and Regional Science Program at the National Science Foundation. In 2004, Professor Lam was elected as the President of the University Consortium on Geographic Information Science. In the same year, she was honored with an Outstanding Contributions in Remote Sensing Award by the Remote Sensing Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers. In 2006, Professor Lam was honored with a LSU Distinguished Faculty Award.
Project Seminar #3 [Choose between 2 speakers]
Andrew Curtis, GIS Research Laboratory, Department of Geography, University of Southern California
Using GIS to Reveal Spatial Patterns in the 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic of New Orleans
Andrew Curtis, Ph.D., Department of Geography at the University of Southern California and former Director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and GIS for Public Health at Louisiana State University. His research interests include the geography of health, with a particular emphasis on spatial analysis and geospatial technology. His research interests range from Chagas disease to cancer, bioterrorism to infant mortality, and related to this talk -- the history of North American spatial epidemiological investigations and medical cartography. In 2005 after the landfall of Hurricane Katrina, he and his WHOCC lab were part of a Louisiana State University team providing geospatial support for search and rescue operations in the Louisiana Emergency Operation Center. He continues to work on various Katrina related recovery projects, including developing new geospatial approaches to capture post-disaster data, which have been subsequently used for the California Wildfires of 2007, and the Tennessee Tornadoes of 2008.
Daniel Janies, Ph.D., Department of Biomedical Informatics, Ohio State University
Genomic and Geographic Analysis of the Evolution and Spread of Infectious Disease
Daniel Janies is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at The Ohio State University. Dr. Janies teaches computational analysis of genomic information for biomedical research. He won an award for excellence in teaching and research from the School of Biomedical Sciences at Ohio State in 2007. Before joining the faculty of Ohio State in 2003, Dr. Janies received a Bachelor of Sciences degree in Biology from the University of Michigan in 1988 and a Ph.D. in Zoology from the University of Florida in 1995. Dr. Janies worked as a postdoctoral fellow (1996-1999) and a principal investigator (2000-2002) at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where he lead a team that, using off-the-shelf PC components, built one of the worlds largest computing clusters in 2001.
Dr. Janies' current research concerns the global spread of emergent infectious diseases. His work involves the use of large-scale computations on genetic and geographic data derived from viruses and their hosts, both animal and human.
Dr. Janies is an active member of the Columbus Ohio Health Intelligence Team, a local initiative of Columbus Public Health and the Franklin County Board of Health to prepare for and respond to pandemic influenza. On the international level, Dr. Janies has worked in France and taught in Brazil and Argentina. His work has been the subject of local and international press coverage and he was recently called to testify to the United States Senate on "Forestalling the Coming Pandemic: Infectious Disease Surveillance Overseas".