Robert Earickson was raised in the Southwest United States. He attended Arizona State University, where he received his BS and MA degrees in geography. He then went to the University of Washington to complete his Ph.D in 1968. Bob’s interest in health geography began with a research project that took him to Chicago to work with Pierre de Vise, Richard Morrill, Brian Berry, and Gerald Pyle on the Chicago Regional Hospital Study in 1967. His earliest publications were associated with his Chicago work; his dissertation was published in the University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Papers series (#124). He taught at the University of Hawaii until 1973, where he first met Melinda Meade, who was working on her Ph. D. under Warwick Armstrong. He then migrated to Maryland, where he assumed his present affiliation until his retirement in 2000.
His interest in social geography emerged at the University of Hawaii, where he studied the residential geography of ethnic groups in that state. After his move to Maryland, he developed his medical geography courses, and wrote a textbook on quantitative methodology. In 1979, he received a US Department of Housing and Urban Development Fellowship, where he was engaged for a year in an environmental study of lead in public housing. He was asked to join the editorial board as the senior editor of the Geography section at the Elsevier journal Social Science Medicine in 1986, which he held until 2004. He joined Melinda Meade to produce the second edition of Medical Geography (Guilford Press) in 2000. Bob is retired from academia, but is an advisor to the Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group, and devotes considerable time to this web site. He wrote a chapter, Medical Geography, for the online Encyclopedia on Human Geography (Elsevier).
Bob may be contacted at robert.earickson@verizon.net.
Updated: Robert Earickson, Associate Professor Emeritus, Department of Geography and Environmental Systems, University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA, and since 2002, Webmaster, AAG Health and Medical Geography Specialty Group Bob’s teaching and research interests included urban geography, geographies of disease, health services, and health policy He also did a stint as Chair of the HMGSG in the 1990s
Health and Medical Geography 