Dr. Carol Hanchette, Associate Professor of Geography and Geosciences; and Associate appointment in School of Public Health and Information Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, USA. Carol’s teaching and research foci are on medical geography, spatial analysis and the use of geographic information science (GIS) for health analyses.
After nearly ten years as an archaeologist, Carol returned to graduate school in the mid-1980s to pursue studies in geography. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, with specializations in medical geography and GIS. Prior to her appointment at the University of Louisville in 2002, Carol worked for seven years as the GIS director for North Carolina’s State Center for Health Statistics and for three years at the North Carolina-based Research Triangle Institute, where she was responsible for the development, implementation and management of geographic analysis projects in the health and social sciences.
Carol’s research projects have included the spatial analysis of prostate cancer mortality (and preliminary testing of the Vitamin D hypothesis), geographic modeling and political ecology of childhood lead poisoning in North Carolina, environmental risk assessment for the EPA, and geographic analysis of CDC-funded HIV prevention services.
Carol was a co-investigator on the NIH-funded project ‘Validation of Indirect Pesticide Exposure Estimates,’ a prospective study that utilized GIS and environmental and biological samples to examine atrazine exposures of residents of the State of Illinois (USA). She was one of the recipients of NSF funding for the project ‘Data Mining and GIS to Investigate Public Health Information.’ Her current research projects include 1) geographic disparities in women’s cancers in Kentucky, and 2) asthma, air quality and environmental justice in Louisville, KY. Carol has conducted GIS workshops at URISA, ATSDR and American Medical Informatics Assocation (AMIA) conferences and has authored a chapter on GIS in Public Health Informatics and Information Systems (Springer-Verlag)
Carol may be contacted
at carol.hanchette@louisville.edu .
Updated: April 2009 —
Health and Medical Geography 