2025-02-21 Weekly Notes
21 February 2025
So back to the routine after coming from Italy for BIOSPACE25. It was a really great experience in the ESA HQ but I got a cold from Italy 😷.
This week started by going to the Social and Spatial Epidemiology Module from the PHS MPhil in the Biomedical Campus. It’s originally desgined to help public health students understand that it is a spatial domain, with all that it means. I really enjoyed the course in that I was exposed to things that I wasn’t aware of like redlining and gerrymandering in the US.
Special shoutout to Dr James Lewis, invited speaker to the module, who is an active nephrologist in Atlanta, Georgia. His lecture is one of the most engaging I’ve ever seen here in Cambridge. I really enjoyed how he initiated with the story about his aunt and ended with his daughter. He also included some self-produced music and a podcast, where he and other colleagues discuss about disparities in health in the US.
In other endeavors, I started working on the side project of building a digital twin for the university for which I’m going to use the proprietary software by Esri, since all the spatial infrastructure in the University is handled with ArcGIS. It’s a very exciting project with Ramit Debnath and Emily So and will write about it once everything is in a working stage.
Finally, I redveloped my interactive map of the 3-30-300 rule in England using the updated methodology. I used CARTO for this one and included a couple of widgets that allow the user to filter the map by local authorities or regions in England. It turns out that building these dashboards is more straightforward than I thought in this platform than it is in other platform (looking at you Esri). The power of visualizing the data and not the numbers is that you see patterns or mistakes in your data processing pipeline. Check the map here