Geographic Information Science
"Data is the plural of ancedote."
Danny Dorling
Nadine Schuurman
I am a GIScience researcher with a broad range of interests including geography of overdose, runnability, health geography and critical GIScience.
I began my career in critical GIScience and morphed into a health geographer soon after I started my job at SFU. For a decade and a half, I worked almost exclusively in health geography with projects in global public health, location services and population health. More recently I have become interested in how the environment affects where people health including runnability as well as risk of overdose and pedestrian injuries. I still write occasional papers that fall into the broad category of human geography. There are four themes that animate all of my research: spatial access to health services; health surveillance; volunteered geographic information; and the influence of the environment on health events. I have an active lab that hosts several graduate students and research assistants. We work together as a team; this approach has led to a very productive environment.
On-going projects
RUNNABILITY
Runnability comprises the features of the natural and built environment that make it attractive to runners. Very little research has been done to date to establish what the key environmental correlates of running are. This project is designed to help our team identify environments that support running and disseminate them to a broader audience.
Understanding runnability is important as it will inform urban planning, exercise promotion, and creation of natural environments that support running. Our team is working on many aspects of runnability including creating indices, surveys, and environmental scans.
You can visit The Runner Study website for more detailed information on this project.
OVERDOSE GEOGRAPHY
I am part of a team lead by Dr. Amanda Slaunwhite at UBC and BC Mental Health and Substance Use Services investigating the relationship between overdoses and the built environment. To date, there have been no studies that focus on environmental correlates with overdoses, both fatal and non-fatal. Our team is working with geographical precepts to look for these links in order to better understand risk and prevention strategies for drug overdoses.
