Abstract submissions for URISA’s GIS in Public Health Conference will be accepted until January 31, 2013. The conference will take place in Miami, Florida, June 17-20, 2013 and is chaired by long-time program committee member, Jason K. Blackburn, PhD, Emerging Pathogens Institute & Department of Geography at the University of Florida. This biennial conference has been previously presented in New Orleans (2007), Providence (2009) and Atlanta (2011) and was established to provide an open and participatory forum for advancing the effective use of spatial information and geographic information system technologies across the domains of public health, healthcare and community health preparedness.

The educational program is developed through a peer review of submissions received through the Call for Presentations. The broad conference theme for the 2013 event is: Geospatial tools for understanding health issues related to the environment, human population, and animal populations and the intersections of the three.

Individuals are asked to categorize their abstract submissions according to the thematic areas noted below: 

Disease Ecology & Environment  

• Disease Ecology - such topics as vector ecology, parasitic diseases, pathogen reservoirs and pathogen persistence
• One Health - Human Health topics (chronic diseases like cancer, obesity & diabetes and HIV), other communicable diseases, non-communicable diseases and public health applications; Built Environment & Neighborhood Effects (including food environment); Animal Health (livestock and wildlife diseases) and Zoonoses (human/livestock/wildlife interface).
• Environmental monitoring including water quality, pollution, waste management, and air quality

Geospatial/GIS Applications & Techniques 

• Spatio-temporal modeling - topics such as prospective surveillance (syndromic surveillance) and retrospective analysis
• Data mining
• Predictive modeling - spatial regression; ecological niche & species distribution modeling; and other modeling techniques/methods
• Web-based applications - participatory; Mobile GIS; spatial decision support systems

Health Care Services, Delivery & Access 

• Health services - health care delivery; health care access; health care disparities; program monitoring and evaluation; community epidemiology and public health preparedness

The committee encourages the submission of individual papers, sessions, and posters until January 31, 2013. The link to the Call for Presentations is: http://www.urisa.org/2013health_call