Current Projects
2015 Orange Community Health Assessment
Race bias in NC traffic stops/searches
Race bias in NC Industrial Hog Operation (IHO) siting
Improved surveillance of child maltreatment, Wake County NC
CDC Regional Public Health Mapping Collaborative
Geospatial issues / traversal algorithms for finding tobacco retailers
Past Projects
2011 Community Health Assessment
Billing Quality Improvement
Small Area Poverty Index
Prescription Drug Policy Support & Evaluation Plan
EMR Selection & Implementation
Clinic citing & evaluation
Billing & Management Dashboards
Population Health Data Dashboards
2015 Orange Community Health Assessment
I serve as data sub-committee chair for the 2015 Orange County Community Health Assessment, helping with sampling, analysis and report writing. After some analysis of sampling challenges in 2011, we selected a strategy and are moving forward with surveys in June 2015. More on this project as it continues into the summer and fall.
Race bias in NC traffic stops/searches
I’ve joined up with an existing team lead by Frank Baumgartner to support community organizing around race bias in NC policing, focusing on traffic stops, searches and arrests. I’ve been specifically working on census data questions, GIS mapping and data visualization, local organizing (Orange County) through the NAACP and the Bias-Free Policing Committee, report writing, and dashboard creation.
- Frank Baumgartner’s page, with lots of statewide analysis
- Orange Bias-Free Policing Policy Recommendations
- Policy / Data Dashboards (in progress)
- Maps
Race bias in NC Industrial Hog Operation (IHO) siting
North Carolina is the Industrial Hog Operation (IHO) capital of the world – unlike traditional farming methods, these super-high density IHOs create much higher levels of waste. This waste (~ 1 billion gallons of pig feces a year) exposes an estimated 1 million nearby North Carolinians to a host of negative outcomes including potent smells that impact daily activies and ability to be outdoors; airborne particulates as feces are sprayed on nearby fields and fans blow toxic fumes from enclosures; and potential polluting of drinking water when feces lagoons leak or are flooded. My advisor, Professor Steve Wing has been working on this issue for over a decade, and in the past few years with the help of post-doc Jill Johnston. Most recently a preliminary analysis of disparate exposure to these IHOs by race was used as support for a Title 6 claim against NC DENR to the US EPA.
The original data analysis was done in multiple tools – excel for dataset prep, ArcGIS for mapping and spatial joins, and STATA for regressions. I updated the excel-based dataset prep using more robust, automated methods and was able to isolate a set of strangely coded records to follow-up on. I’m moving the three-part analysis to a push-button process in R, handling dataset prep, spatial overlays and mapping, and regressions in one fell swoop.
See Steve Wing’s TED talk on NC Industrial Hog Farming,
Recent headlines on the topic:
- Environmental Health News, 2015
- Rural America, In these times, 2015. Includes Nat McHardy’s excellent map of % enslaved in 1860 vs. anticipated siting of Industrial Hog Operations in 2014.
- National Geographic, 2014.
If you’re interested in this kind of analysis in R, you might also check StackExchange GIS for the question I posed related to the poly-poly analysis. I’ll be posting the code itself soon, for reference.
Improved surveillance of child maltreatment, Wake County NC
More coming soon.
CDC Regional Public Health Mapping Collaborative
More coming soon.
Geospatial issues / traversal algorithms for finding tobacco retailers
More coming soon.
2011 Community Health Assessment
My first connection with the Orange County Health Department was as the data analyst for the 2011 Community Health Assessment, where I ran analyses on the primary collection survey data, produced report pages, reported out to the community and facilitated conversations with residents about those findings. Through those conversations and a democratic prioritization process, Orange County decided on three priorities for 2011-2015: (1) Child and Family Obesity, (2) Substance Abuse & Mental Health, and (3) Access to Care.
You can read the final report, the executive summary, and Nidhi Sachedeva’s fantastic presentation of our findings at the Healthy Carolinians Annual Meeting on the Orange County Health Department’s statistics and publications page.
Billing Quality Improvement
More coming soon.
Small Area Poverty Index
More coming soon.
Prescription Drug Policy Support & Evaluation Plan
More coming soon.
EMR Selection & Implementation
More coming soon.
Clinic citing & evaluation
More coming soon.
Billing & Management Dashboards
More coming soon.
Population Health Data Dashboards
More coming soon.
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