Today in Geography: Remembering the declaration of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Today, we welcomed Dr. Sue Grady, a professor in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences at Michigan State University. Dr. Grady is a health and medical geographer. Her research focuses on women’s health, specifically maternal and infant health. She is interested in understanding how local environments in which women live impact their health (i.e., increase the opportunity for infectious disease transmission and/or contribute to chronic diseases), which in turn, impair their pregnancies, leading to adverse maternal and infant outcomes. Most of her current research focuses on reducing maternal and infant mortality. She is studying perinatal regionalization in Michigan to improve our understanding of inpatient hospital referral patterns of high-risk African American mothers and infants. Dr. Grady utilizes geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial epidemiological methods, including multilevel modeling, to disentangle these complexities. The students she mentors are interested in a variety of health and medical geography topics.Dr. Grady discussed her research as well as the official declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. If you would like to learn more about Dr. Grady’s research, please visit https://geo.msu.edu/directory/grady-sue.html or her Google Scholar page at https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IdbEU9oAAAAJ&hl=en.If you would like to learn more about the American Association of Geographers Health and Medical Geography Specialty group, visit ⁠ https://www.aag.org/groups/health-and-medical-geography/.  Our sponsor for this episode is the MSU onGEO Professional GIS Certificate Program. If you are looking to revamp your current career, earn continuing-education credits, or simply learn new and marketable geospatial skills, visit today to learn how to earn a professional certificate in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or Geospatial Data Analytics & Visualization. Learn more at https://ongeo.msu.edu/.