Harvard Chan NIEHS Center for Environmental Health
The Harvard Chan National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) Center for Environmental Health is a coordinated set of resources and facilities supporting environmental health research and training activities throughout the Boston area. The center promotes integration between basic and applied environmental science, and fosters collaborations that cross departmental and institutional boundaries.
665 Huntington Ave.
Building 1-1402
Boston, MA 02115
Geospatial Services
To enhance the utility of existing population and clinical studies by making place-based measures of traditional environmental stressors, neighborhood contextual variables, and social constructs available and accessible to all Center members.
The Center provides expertise in GIS, creation and interpretation of contextual variables and social constructs. We convene working groups of investigators working on related topics to identify common data needs, share resources, and subject matter expertise. We also provide the necessary infrastructure to support educational activities such as seminars and workshops of relevance to Center
Scientifically, we promote the integration of the Center’s core research areas. We also provide data products to Center investigators that can be used as preliminary data in grant proposals or as exposure data, confounders, or modifiers in Center research projects.
Services
- Conduct Needs Analysis
- GIS training and data services
- Environmental and contextual measures questionnaire design
- Mobile application and digital phenotyping training and data services
- Seminar series
- Focused working group
Resources
The Harvard Center for Geographic Analysis (CGA) is a university wide resource that supports research and education in the field of spatial analysis and geographic information. The Center also manages site licenses for GIS and other software. CGA staff operate a GIS Help Desk at the HSPH Microlab (Kresge Lower Level) Tuesdays 1:30-4:00.
Other Harvard Resources
- Harvard Graduate School of Design GIS Resources
- Harvard Geospatial Library
- Harvard Map Collection
- Health Map: Health Map brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. This freely available Web site integrates outbreak data of varying reliability, ranging from news sources (such as Google News) to curated personal accounts (such as ProMED) to validated official alerts (such as World Health Organization). Through an automated text processing system, the data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.
Helpful Links
- Federal Geographic Data Committee (FGDC) – establishes standards for metadata
- ET Spatial Techniques Source for ET GeoWizards a set of functions that can be used with ArcGIS.
- Geographical Analysis published a series of articles highlighting developments in spatial analysis software for the social sciences (Volume 38, Issue 1, 2006, available electronically at Harvard). This issue was inspired by a 2002 workshop sponsored by The Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science (CSISS) at UC Santa Barbara
Do you have a question? Fill out the form on our ‘Contact Us’ page and click ‘GIS’.