REU Site: Cyber-Health GIS ? Multidisciplinary Research Experiences in Spacial Dynamics of Health

Abstract

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the SBE Directorate. As such, it has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. This REU Site combines the fields of Computing, Geographic Information Science (GIS), and Health on the Texas A&M University (TAMU) campus in College Station, TX where undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in Computing, GIS, and Health work together on collaborative research projects in a newly emerging field called Cyber-Enabled HealthGIS (Cyber-HealthGIS). Thirty REU students (ten each year) are engaged in research teams to promote discovery, teaching, and training through hands-on research and mentoring. Students are mentored and trained in the basics of research techniques, the responsible conduct of research, the need for diversity in research, and research designs and methods. The REU Site students collaboratively pose, execute, and evaluate research projects resulting in research advances in Cyber-HealthGIS. Through this approach, students learn research and problem-solving outside of their own discipline, and gain independence and confidence in their own ability to undertake research. This program will advance the new field of Cyber-HealthGIS by building theory, methods, and approaches which will lead to joint faculty-student publications in research journals, seminars, and conferences, and student presentations of their own research. This program fills a critical US workforce gap by creating a generation of students trained for and interested in research and scientific careers in Cyber-HealthGIS, a rapidly advancing field with the potential to improve human health and well-being. The student projects and example prototypes developed through this program will be made freely available to help foster innovation and development in the Cyber-HealthGIS industry.

In this REU Site, the ideas from each student's academic/disciplinary domain is integrated to form a cohesive, achievable research goal under the umbrella of the core research themes of this project, which include (1) Outbreak surveillance through the combination of authoritative and social media data; (2) High-resolution chronic disease risk mapping with citizen-derived perceptions of community; and (3) Continuous time-enabled scalable outbreak planning. Students work closely with faculty mentors to pose the research question, develop testable hypotheses, obtain the necessary data, organize appropriate methods, engineer an approach, perform experiments, and undertake an evaluation of the results. This project will make freely available examples of prototype applications, thereby advancing the capabilities of Cyber-HealthGIS research through the development and release of free and open source (FOSS) code for the systems and example data sets used in the student research and experiments.