PROMOTING HUMAN WELL-BEING Population, Health and Place

Optimizing Food Security

The lack of timely, integrated and accessible information about fluctuations in the food system and the risks these pose to food and nutrition security has stymied the ability to improve food resilience.

Advancing Precision Medicine

When it comes to a baby’s health, the air its mother breathes makes a critical difference. Rima Habre and other SSI researchers have found that Hispanic women living in neighborhoods with high levels of air pollution early in their pregnancies have babies with lower birth weights. Habre, associate professor of population and public health sciences and spatial sciences, is a lead investigator with the USC Maternal Developmental Risks from Environmental and Social Stressors (MADRES) Center for Environmental Health Disparities. With funding from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Habre’s team is using innovative geospatial technology to capture personal exposures and genetic makeup to formulate individual analyses of disease risk and aid prevention efforts, expanding the boundaries of precision medicine. Population, Health and Place Ph.D. alumni Yan Xu and Li Yi contributed to this study.

Funded with a $2-million National Science Foundation grant, interdisciplinary USC scientists led by Kayla de la Haye, associate professor of population and public health sciences and spatial sciences; Wändi Bruine de Bruin, provost professor of public policy, psychology and behavioral science; and John P. Wilson, are working with Los Angeles County leaders, community organizations and private partners to build a comprehensive data portal that will give stakeholders the ability to understand the dynamics of a county food system, enabling them to flag the issues most in need of intervention. The portal will serve as a prototype for cities and counties across the U.S. to increase food system resilience. SSI researchers include Population, Health and Place Ph.D. candidates Leo Lerner, Michelle Livings and Mengya Xu, M.S. Spatial Data Sciences students Dominic Borelli and TianLiang Zhao and M.S. Geographic Information Science and Technology student Matthew Bauer

Improving Health Equity

The World Health Organization considers geographic access to pharmacies to be a key determinant of access to essential medicine access. And yet, proximity to pharmacy services is generally not factored into the analysis of health care accessibility. One-third of neighborhoods in the largest U.S. cities—including Los Angeles—are a pharmacy desert, with Black or Hispanic/Latino communities being the most impacted neighborhoods. SSI faculty affiliate Dima M. Qato, associate professor of pharmacy, is leading an initiative to generate real-time information with spatial computing and analysis capabilities for national, state and local policy officials, health care academics, industry professionals and others. Qato, Robert O. Vos, associate professor (teaching) of spatial sciences, and Taylor Robinson (M.S. GIST ’22), in collaboration with others in the Program on Medicines and Public Health, have developed an interactive mapping tool that shows the location of every pharmacy in the United States and pharmacy shortage areas. Their goal is to support policymakers and other leaders in developing strategies to improve pharmacy access in underserved communities with historically marginalized populations on a national scale. Their collaborators include the USC Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics and the National Community Pharmacists Association, which represents independent pharmacies around the country.

Jonathan M. Tan, assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology and spatial sciences, is spatially analyzing economic and environmental data with individual pediatric patient electronic health records to provide a deeper understanding of the social determinants of health risk factors that patients experience. Tan and undergraduate researcher Alicia Adiwidjaja determined that patients who came from census tracts of high social vulnerability were more likely to miss or cancel telehealth appointments and opt out of caudal epidural injections during general anesthesia. Their findings are foundational for developing intervention strategies that address health care inequities; their novel methodology of using geospatial analysis with patient population data linkage techniques has application beyond the pediatric pain unit.