Many aspects of public health are connected to geographic or spatial factors, requiring geographic information systems (GIS) to help in analyzing and visualizing these spatial relationships. Ideal for community and urban planning professionals, public health data analysts and epidemiologists, this online course will expand learners’ existing data management, analytical and communication skills with spatial data. Gain practical, hands-on experience through pre-recorded and live lectures, live lab sessions and assignments where you’ll work through a variety of troubleshooting exercises. By the end of this course, you’ll understand the background of GIS in public health, and gain the practical skills to process, summarize, analyze and present GIS public health data in Esri ArcGIS suite and the R programming language.

Learning Outcomes

• Import, evaluate and wrangle spatial data
• Perform exploratory data analysis to understand spatial data
• Transform spatial data to the appropriate formats/extents and understand potential limitations/biases to present data
• Analyze and operationalize spatial data to create covariates for epidemiologic analysis

Skills You’ll Gain

• Experience using Esri ArcGIS suite and the R programming language
• Spatial data creation from non-spatial data sources
• Transformation of point-process data to raster data, and vice versa
• Reprojection of data in different coordinate reference systems