There’s a geographic component to any research question. Just ask Alaina Beauchamp (she/her). She’s a spatial epidemiologist, which means she’s the expert colleagues go to when they want to run a study asking: How does where you live affect X?
“X” could be anything. Chronic conditions, infectious disease, mental health. “Social determinants of health — they’re pretty much all going to be tied to geography,” said Beauchamp, a postdoctoral researcher at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Her own research has centered on the intersection between geography and a range of public health issues including suicide by firearms and police shootings. Beauchamp also has a particular interest in how new technologies like artificial intelligence could help address inequities when it comes to issues like access to care.
“That’s what I’m really passionate about, is bridging these gaps with technology,” said Beauchamp.
Not many people have the overlapping geographic and public health expertise that Beauchamp possesses. Her Ph.D is in epidemiology, but while in school she connected with a mentor whose expertise was geospatial information sciences. “I kind of had to bootstrap a lot of it, honestly,” Beauchamp said. She’s hoping to make things easier for students in the future. Once she becomes a faculty member somewhere, she wants to build out a structured program where people can learn about spatial epidemiology.
In the meantime, she spends most of her days writing code to run models for research papers. One of her three cats — Moki, Tyrion, and Luka — is almost always on her lap.
— Theresa Gaffney
