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，它兼具科学和社会效益，并将研究和教育融为一体。这个REU网站结合了位于德克萨斯州College Station的德克萨斯农工大学(TAMU)校区的计算、地理信息科学(GIS)和健康领域，来自不同计算、地理信息科学和健康背景的本科生在一个名为Cyber-Enable HealthGIS(Cyber-HealthGIS)的新兴领域共同开展合作研究项目。30名REU学生(每年10名)参加研究团队，通过实践研究和指导促进发现、教学和培训。对学生进行基本的研究技巧、负责任的研究行为、研究多样性的必要性以及研究设计和方法方面的指导和培训。REU网站的学生协作提出、执行和评估研究项目，从而促进网络健康地理信息系统的研究进展。通过这种方法，学生在自己的学科之外学习研究和解决问题，并获得独立和对自己进行研究的能力的信心。这一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在研究期刊、研讨会和会议上联合发表文章，以及学生对他们自己的研究的陈述。该项目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并接受过培训的学生，填补了美国劳动力的一个关键缺口。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范例原型将免费提供，以帮助促进Cyber-HealthGIS行业的创新和发展。在这个REU网站中，每个学生的学术/学科领域的想法被整合在这个项目的核心研究主题下，以形成一个连贯的、可实现的研究目标，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)高分辨率慢性病风险地图与公民对社区的感知；以及(3)持续的时间可扩展的疫情规划。学生与教师导师密切合作，提出研究问题，开发可检验的假设，获得必要的数据，组织适当的方法，设计方法，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，从而通过为学生研究和实验中使用的系统和示例数据集开发和发布免费和开放源代码(FOSS)代码来提高Cyber-HealthGIS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.