UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Location has played a major role during the COVID-19 pandemic, and spatial data analysis has directed intervention efforts. Teams of public health officials, medical professionals and health geographers have worked together to identify on-the-ground needs, where to direct resources and where new variants have emerged.

Andrew Curtis, professor in the Department of Population and Quantitative Health Sciences at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, will discuss his work responding to the pandemic and how his earlier work during Hurricane Katrina informed his approach to COVID-19, during a talk at 4 p.m. on Friday, April 15.

The talk will take place in 112 Walker Building and be broadcast via Zoom.

Curtis is a health geographer who works in the areas of spatial epidemiology, context-driven spatial data collection in challenging environments and spatial confidentiality. He focuses on developing techniques to collect and analyze data at the scale of intervention. He studies scales — including the home, street, block and neighborhood — at which problems can be identified and tackled through policy and action with expert collaborators. He is also a former director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for GIS and Remote Sensing in Public Health.

He holds a bachelor's degree in geography and economics from Portsmouth Polytechnic, a postgraduate certificate from Oxford University, and a master's degree and a doctoral degree in geography from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Curtis’ talk is part of the spring 2022 Coffee Hour seminar series hosted by Penn State’s Department of Geography.