AAG Annual Meeting, San Francisco, California, March 17-21, 2026
Organizers: Richard Sadler (Michigan State University, sadlerr@msu.edu) & Marynia Kolak (University of Illinois, mkolak@illinois.edu)
We’re super excited to introduce to you SIXTEEN Geospatial Health Research Symposium sessions at AAG 2026! Sessions will be held back to back, from Tuesday afternoon until Friday afternoon.
We’ll also have a few overlapping sessions for our Peter Gould student paper competition, as well as our Emerging Scholar talk (on Wednesday and Thursday). Our Mid-Career Scholar and Distinguished Scholar talks will have no competing GHRS sessions, and will be held on Thursday immediately preceding our business meeting!
GHRS topics this year include:
- Mortality
- Infectious Disease
- Urban & Rural Health
- Health, Harm, & Care
- Urban Green Space
- Multi-Hazard Climate Risks
- Environmental Health & Air Pollution
- Health Behaviors & Outcomes
- Neighborhood Evolution
- Advances in Methods & Approaches
- Food Systems & Nutrition
- Geographies of Health Care
We will also be sponsoring a TON (okay, a few dozen) more sessions on topics including:
- Accessibility and Mobility
- Actionable Science for Air Quality
- Climate-Health Challenges
- Elevating Student Research for Climate Justice
- Exploring Rural-Urban Health Disparities
- GeoAI and Deep Learning
- Disease Ecology
- Geographies of Aging and the Life Course
- Health in Crisis
- Human Mobility & Vulnerable Populations
- Structural Drivers of Health
- Navigating the Urban Heat Crisis
- Urban Green Spaces
- Structural Racism & Health Inequity
- Global Pandemics, Climate Change, and Food Security
- Environmental Exposure & Mobility Patterns
- Technology & Innovation for Community Health
- The Role of Identity in Geographies of Health & Lifestyle
- Confronting Heat and Air Pollution Challenges
- Transportation & Environmental Exposure
- Urban Health Dynamics
- Women’s Health in the Era of Climate Change
We’re looking forward to planning it all over again and seeing you next year!
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In this symposium, we are bringing together national and international scholars, practitioners, and policy makers from different specialties, institutions, sectors, and continents to share ideas, findings, methodologies, and technologies, and to establish and strengthen personal connections, communication channels, and research collaborations.
We welcome papers on all aspects of health and wellbeing, as well as health and medical geography and their intersections with other branches of geography, GIScience, and other disciplines. Topics may include but are not limited to:
Environmental Health
– Representation and measurement of contextual or environmental influences
– EcoGeographic genetic epidemiology: gene-environment interactions
– Disease ecologies
Climate Change and health
– Infectious diseases and their relations to climate change
– Climate change and mental health
– Vulnerable groups and places
– Climate events and planning
Devices and technologies for measuring mobility and environmental exposures
– Mobilities and health
– Linkage of GPS data, imagery, video, air monitor, accelerometry
– Assessment of environmental exposures
Healthcare Services
– Accessibility of healthcare services and its optimization
– Healthcare provision, access, and utilization
– Health disparities and inequalities
– Global health research and public health initiatives
Novel Methodologies
– CyberGIS and high performance computing in health studies
– Geospatial big data and health
– Crowd sourcing of geospatial data for health research (including twitter)
– Novel (geo)visualization methods
– mHealth and global health service delivery initiatives
To participate in the Symposium at the AAG Annual Meeting, please submit your abstract. When you receive confirmation of a successful abstract submission, please forward this confirmation to the symposium organizers and let us know whether your talk will be in-person or virtual.
We are also accepting session and panel submissions. Please submit the title of your session or panel and type (virtual or in-person). Upon acceptance, further instructions will be sent to officially become part of the Symposium.
Please contact the symposium organizers if you have any questions.
Health and Medical Geography 