REU Site: Cyber-HealthGIS - Multidisciplinary Research Experiences in Spatial Dynamics of Health

该项目由SBE理事会的本科生研究经验（REU）站点计划资助。因此，它具有科学效益和社会效益，并将研究和教育结合起来。这个REU网站结合了计算、地理信息科学（GIS）和健康领域的德克萨斯农工大学（TAMU）校园，在那里，来自不同背景的计算、GIS和健康的本科生在一个新兴的领域合作研究项目，称为网络健康地理信息系统（Cyber-HealthGIS）。30名REU学生（每年10名）参与研究团队，通过实践研究和指导促进发现、教学和培训。学生在研究技术、负责任的研究行为、研究多样性的需求以及研究设计和方法的基础知识方面得到指导和培训。REU网站的学生合作提出，执行和评估研究项目，导致网络健康gis的研究进展。通过这种方法，学生可以在自己的学科之外学习研究和解决问题的能力，并对自己进行研究的能力获得独立性和信心。该计划将通过建立理论、方法和途径来推进网络健康地理信息系统的新领域，这些理论、方法和途径将导致师生联合出版物在研究期刊、研讨会和会议上发表，以及学生自己的研究报告。该计划通过培养一代对网络健康地理信息系统的研究和科学事业感兴趣的学生，填补了美国关键的劳动力缺口，网络健康地理信息系统是一个快速发展的领域，具有改善人类健康和福祉的潜力。通过该计划开发的学生项目和示例原型将免费提供，以帮助促进网络健康gis行业的创新和发展。在这个REU网站上，每个学生的学术/学科领域的想法被整合起来，形成一个有凝聚力的、可实现的研究目标，在这个项目的核心研究主题的保护下，其中包括：(1)通过结合权威和社交媒体数据进行疫情监测；(2)基于市民社区认知的高分辨率慢性病风险制图；(3)持续支持时间的可扩展爆发计划。学生与教师导师密切合作，提出研究问题，发展可测试的假设，获得必要的数据，组织适当的方法，设计一种方法，进行实验，并对结果进行评估。该项目将免费提供原型应用程序的示例，从而通过开发和发布系统的免费和开源（FOSS）代码以及学生研究和实验中使用的示例数据集，提高网络健康地理信息系统研究的能力。

This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the SBE Directorate. As such, it has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. This REU Site combines the fields of Computing, Geographic Information Science (GIS), and Health on the Texas A&M University (TAMU) campus in College Station, TX where undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds in Computing, GIS, and Health work together on collaborative research projects in a newly emerging field called Cyber-Enabled HealthGIS (Cyber-HealthGIS). Thirty REU students (ten each year) are engaged in research teams to promote discovery, teaching, and training through hands-on research and mentoring. Students are mentored and trained in the basics of research techniques, the responsible conduct of research, the need for diversity in research, and research designs and methods. The REU Site students collaboratively pose, execute, and evaluate research projects resulting in research advances in Cyber-HealthGIS. Through this approach, students learn research and problem-solving outside of their own discipline, and gain independence and confidence in their own ability to undertake research. This program will advance the new field of Cyber-HealthGIS by building theory, methods, and approaches which will lead to joint faculty-student publications in research journals, seminars, and conferences, and student presentations of their own research. This program fills a critical US workforce gap by creating a generation of students trained for and interested in research and scientific careers in Cyber-HealthGIS, a rapidly advancing field with the potential to improve human health and well-being. The student projects and example prototypes developed through this program will be made freely available to help foster innovation and development in the Cyber-HealthGIS industry.In this REU Site, the ideas from each student's academic/disciplinary domain is integrated to form a cohesive, achievable research goal under the umbrella of the core research themes of this project, which include (1) Outbreak surveillance through the combination of authoritative and social media data; (2) High-resolution chronic disease risk mapping with citizen-derived perceptions of community; and (3) Continuous time-enabled scalable outbreak planning. Students work closely with faculty mentors to pose the research question, develop testable hypotheses, obtain the necessary data, organize appropriate methods, engineer an approach, perform experiments, and undertake an evaluation of the results. This project will make freely available examples of prototype applications, thereby advancing the capabilities of Cyber-HealthGIS research through the development and release of free and open source (FOSS) code for the systems and example data sets used in the student research and experiments.