To advance resilient and healthy communities, we need nimble, adaptive technological infrastructures that make data about the social determinants of health easily accessible, findable, and contextualized. Accessing data about the social, economic, political, and environmental factors that make up U.S. neighborhoods and regions is more important than ever, as SDOH may explain more than half of variation in many health outcomes—at the same time, those previously public data sources may no longer be stable nor supported. As data continues to be removed and/or censored from U.S. governmental websites in the Great Purge, adaptive approaches are needed to link data recovery and organization efforts. We share how a community-centered approach engaging academic and clinical institutions advance data recovery efforts and mitigation strategies, building on prior work in SDOH data curation, using design thinking and spatial data infrastructures. Federated spatial data infrastructures that incorporate both data discovery and recovery components may be crucial to support cross-sector scientific innovation and public health research during periods of external shocks.
Dr. Kolak is a health geographer and spatial epidemiologist integrating a socio-ecological view of health, spatial data science, and a human-centered design approach to investigate regional and neighborhood health equity. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography & GIScience at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is Vice Chair at the Health & Medical Geography Specialty Group at the American Association of Geographers. Leading the Healthy Regions & Policies Lab, they also serve as PI/MPI on multiple projects including the SDOH & Place Project and Localize Opioid Use Disorder (LOUD) Study.
The Public Data for the Public Good summer webinar series is co-sponsored by the Center for Urban and Regional Analysis and the Research Commons at the University Libraries.
