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Profiles in Health Geography: Aniruddha “Rudy” Banerjee
Dr. Aniruddha “Rudy” Banerjee, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Indiana University, Purdue University at Indianapolis (IUPUI), and Research Fellow, Prevention Research Center, Berkeley, CA. His interests are in spatial and computational statistics, spatial econometrics, decision support systems, and applied operations research (environmental and population health).
Rudy Banerjee earned his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Bengal Engineering College-University of Calcutta India. Migrating to the United States, he earned an MS degree in Urban and Regional Planning and his doctorate in Geography (environmental epidemiology and GISc) from the University of Iowa. He also has a Graduate Certificate in Transportation Studies from that institution.
Rudy has applied combinatorial optimization methods using both integer programming and graph theoretic approaches, Bayesian simulation of hierarchical networks and stochastic optimizations to analyze health information and develop space-time models of population health. Recently, he was invited to present his National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) research at the School of Medicine, Harvard University. Rudy was the joint recipient of the 2005 Jacques May Thesis Prize. He has been invited to the National Institute of Health (NIH), Oakridge National Laboratories, Institute for the Future (a Rand Corporation spinoff located at Palo Alto, California; where he is a consultant), University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, University of Washington-Seattle, Harvard University, IUPUI ‘Cutting-Edge Lecture Series’ etc. to share his work on GISc and health. In addition to his PhD in Geography (University of Iowa), he has an MS in Transportation Planning and Public Policy from the University of Iowa and a Bachelor of Architecture and Engineering from the University of Calcutta-India. His recent publications (last 16 months) appear in Social Science & Medicine, Vision Research, International Journal of Medical Science, Substance Use and Misuse, and Clinical and Experimental Research, as well as various book chapters.
See also his departmental staff page.
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Originally Posted February 2009 -
Updated: April 2013
Posted in Canada, North American, Profiles, Uncategorized, United States
Tagged sdss, spatial econometrics, spatial statistics
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Profiles in Health Geography: Brian Bossak
Assistant Professor of Environmental Health Sciences,
Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health
Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA, USA
email
Webpage
Brian’s research interests include:
- climate change and human health,
- coastal hazards and public health preparedness,
- disease mapping,
- spatial epidemiology,
- water quality, and
- gene-environment interactions.
Brian is currently Chair of HMGSG.
Brian Bossak earned both a BS and an MA in Geography from the University of Georgia, where he concentrated on geographic techniques (GIS, remote sensing, and photogrammetry). He then earned a PhD in Geography from Florida State University, where he focused on climatology and natural hazards. His dissertation examined US hurricanes and climate teleconnections, including a GIS analysis. He completed a Mendenhall Post-doctoral Research Fellowships with the US Geological Survey, and worked as a Geospatial Technology Lead in the Division of Global Migration and Quarantine at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also earned a Master of Public Health in Environmental and Occupational Health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University.
Recent research includes a study in which GIS and remote sensing are applied to model inundation from climate change-related sea level rise along the southeastern US coastline. Another project involved collecting private well-water samples and conducting laboratory-based environmental analyses of water quality. A particular area of recent research productivity has been in spatial epidemiology. Since 2009, Brian has authored or co-authored work that has been published in Journal of Urban Health, American Journal of Public Health, PLoS One, Health & Place, Geography Compass, Emerging Infectious Diseases, Medical Hypotheses, and the International Journal of Drug Policy. Brian’s teaching interests extend to public health preparedness, medical geography, global climate change and health, spatial statistics, natural hazards, and remote sensing.
Originally Posted: March, 2012.
Updated: April 2013
Posted in North American, Profiles, Uncategorized, United States
Tagged climate, genetics, hazards, spatial epidemiology, water quality
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Profiles in Health Geography: Tim Brown
Dr. Tim Brown, Lecturer in Geography, Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, UK. Tim’s research interests lie primarily in the application of critical discourse analysis to health-related issues. He is Secretary/ Treasurer of the RGS/IBG Geography of Health Research Group and is co-editor of the forthcoming Companion to Health and Medical Geography.
Born in Worcester, England, Tim spent much of his early academic career at the University of Portsmouth. He arrived there as a mature student in 1989 and graduated with a BA in geography in 1992. He then went on to join a small group of graduates from this cohort who went on to undertake doctoral research under the supervision of Pam Shurmer-Smith. He gained his PhD with a dissertation: ‘AIDS in the UK: modes of representation, systems of governance,’ in 1997. Though starting his life as a social and cultural geographer, with a particular interest in Foucaultian discourse analysis, Tim’s association with health geography was cemented when he began work for Professor Graham Moon in 1994. Initially intended as a post that would support the production of a revised edition of Health, Disease and Society, his work with Graham shifted to focus on analyses of health-care restructuring in the UK.
Work in this area has been published in journals such as Transactions of the IBG and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. After completing his thesis, Tim took up a postdoctoral post at Portsmouth in 1998, where he went on to expand his research interests, especially in relation to the development of critical approaches to public health. After leaving Portsmouth in 2003, Tim moved to Loughborough University where he worked closely with Professor Morag Bell on an array of health-related projects before taking up his current position as a Lecturer in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. He is currently working on extending his public health research by examining what might be termed a global ‘ethics of care’ and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Companion to Health and Medical Geography, which will be published in 2009.
Originally posted: March 2008
Posted in European, Profiles, Uncategorized, United Kingdom
Tagged ethics of care, HIV
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A fond farewell from HMGSG Webmaster-Emeritus Bob Earickson
The following note currently appears the HMGSG legacy site left by Bob Earickson:
I became interested in Medical Geography for the first time in 1966 when I worked on a hospital use research project in Chicago for a year. I wrote my dissertation, The Spatial Behavior of Hospital Patients at the University of Washington. At the University of Maryland (Baltimore County campus), I started teaching a course called The Geography of Disease and Health on a semi-regular basis in the 1980s. In the mid-1980s, I became aware that some medical geographers in the United States and Britain had started a symposium in 1984, which convened in the two countries on a biennial basis. I was invited to participate at the 1986 meeting at Rutgers University, New Jersey. It was at this event that I took on the mantle of medical geographer and became actively involved in the Association of American Geographers Medical Geography Specialty Group (MGSG). Not long after that, I became aware that this group had a web site on the emerging internet. Professor Stephen Matthews of the Pennsylvania State University had been maintaining the web site. He was about to leave that task and I volunteered to take it on.ince that time, it has been a labor of love. I was unwilling to settle for posting only notices of meetings, jobs, and graduate programs in the discipline. Among other things, I decided to build a library of profiles of health geographers worldwide.
A few years into this project, I realized that it was going to take an ongoing effort to not only discover the new professionals as they emerged from health geography programs in academia, but to keep the profiles somewhat up to date. Sadly, I have finally had to admit that I can no longer keep up with it. I am gratified to learn that the Health and Medical Geography Group (HMGSG) has selected Kevin Matthews (University of Iowa) to assume the role of webmaster from this date into the foreseeable future. Kevin is active and involved in the developments taking place in health geography and web software. I am confident that you will be pleased with what you see on the new website. I will miss both the human and the electronic connection I have had with health geography for more than a decade.
Respectfully yours, Robert Earickson, 12 April 2013
Posted in News, Uncategorized
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The NEW Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group website
The Mission of the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group
To provide a forum for disseminating research on health and well-being, disease, illness, spatial epidemiology, disease ecology, population health, ethnomedicine and non-Western understandings of health and medicine, spatial aspects of health care delivery, and health care policy and political economy. Further, to promote health geography within geography and related disciplines, and advocate its applications and service to public and private agencies and the general public in the developed and developing world.
The Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group website was a labor of love for Professor Robert Earickson at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. He used the site to curate content about our discipline for over a decade. This new HMGSG.org website is an extension of his efforts, with some notable additions.
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Health and Medical Geography 